A number of reviews of The God Delusion have demonstrated scant sympathy for either Dawkins’ views or his methods. Some, like Steven Weinberg’s, show not only a sympathetic understanding of his “amateur” philosophy (as it is often characterised by those who disagree with him), but share Dawkins’ belief that religion just is the kind of problem that Dawkins takes it to be — a danger to children, society and peace and good order in the world — and that we would be far better without religion and its unfounded beliefs. Kenan Malik, in his review of The God Delusion — I Don’t Believe in Richard Dawkins — argues that Dawkins is weakest on the reasons why people continue to believe.
Less persuasive [he writes] is his attempt to explain what faith is and why people continue to believe. So great is his loathing for religion that it sometimes overwhelms his reasoned argument.
This may perhaps be so, and even if you regard as callow his understanding of religious belief and how it functions in individual lives, Dawkins’ deliberate attempts to shock and discompose the religious by expressing his dislike for and concern about the effects of religious believing on individuals and society is a genuine attempt to force people to look more objectively on modes of life and varieties of thinking which still, ten years after the events of 9/11, are by no means resolved in favour of a peaceful outcome for humankind. The threat is still there, and it is still very real. The fact that religious believers and compromising atheists do not seem fully aware of the problems that religions threaten in a world where weapons are more abundant than ideas is a clear sign that, however successful Dawkins may have been in giving humanity a good shake in an effort to wake them up to dangers which continue to threaten, there is a great deal more of the same yet to be done.
But let me just interject a remark of my own. It is widely thought that being forthright and deliberately offensive about the poverty or religion makes it impossible for Dawkins, and those who think like him, to engage in cooperative efforts with so-called “people of faith”. Since liberal religious believers often remark that Dawkins is overturning god beliefs which they do not themselves hold, there is no reason why this should be so. Even if Dawkins thinks that these “believers” belong to the Neville Chamberlain school of apologetics, enabling the worst kinds of religious believing to do their damage to others and to the world at large, there is no reason for them not to make common cause with Dawkins in an effort to diminish the harm that religion can do. If they do not think that extremist forms of belief, even mildly extremist forms of belief, are dangerous, then they are simply a menace to the future of humanity. If they do not want to be a menace, they should forthrightly say why they reject such forms of belief, and why they cannot associate with them, or allow their own more liberal beliefs to be a flag of convenience for extremists who claim to speak in the name of the religion they apparently share.
I used to say, as an Anglican priest, that if anything would convince me not to be a Christian it would be what most Christians apparently believe. My wife Elizabeth used to say that she was not a Christian but an Anglican, until even that became personally and morally compromising to admit. Religious believers need to be extremely careful of the message that their “faith” sends to other people. Unfortunately, too few of them do that, and extremists sail with impunity through waters that are, from their own point of view, filled with apostates, but apostates who supinely allow themselves to be used as a cover for extremist views. Dawkins is right, in my view, to take a very hard line on this, and to insist that, if you are going to be a believer, you must, to avoid identification with extremists, clearly state where you differ from them. (Many Catholics, for example, favour the free availability to abortion. How many? We don’t know. And this allows the Roman Catholic Church to present itself as solidly opposed to abortion, when, it seems, by a count of heads, it simply is not. Can Catholics afford to allow the official church to define who they are and what they believe?) If this were done, the religious world, which looks much more monolithic than it is, because of the Neville Chamberlains of pious accommodation, might make it able to see that there are varieties of religion to defend, instead of the bold front of unity that is too often on display in response to the criticisms of unbelievers.
H. Allen Orr
This digression responds, in fact, to one of Orr’s criticisms, whose review in The New York Review of Books is the subject of this post. (I hope that Jerry Coyne, who urged me to consider this review, will find it helpful.) Orr says that Dawkins does not “engage religious thought in a serious way,” and that he treats religious thought cavalierly. “[H]e cannot,” Orr says, “tolerate the meticulous reasoning of theologians.” Now, this might be a genuine criticism if the issues with which Dawkins has to deal are really ones where this meticulous reasoning is relevant, but it is not clear that it is. This is the same criticism that Terry Eagleton (in his London Review of Books review of The God Delusion), with rather smug self-satisfaction, levels at Dawkins, writing bumptiously:
What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest case?
One has a right to ask, after something like this is said, how Eagleton thinks that Rahner on grace or Eriugena on subjectivity would have contributed to Dawkins’ argument. Failing that, this is just so much elaborate hand waving.
But should Dawkins have written a theological book? Orr claims that we will
… find no serious examination of Christian or Jewish theology in Dawkins’s book (does he know Augustine rejected biblical literalism in the early fifth century?), no attempt to follow philosophical debates about the nature of religious propositions (are they like ordinary claims about everyday matters), no effort to appreciate the complex history of interaction between the Church and science (does he know the Church had an important part in the rise of non-Aristotelian science?), and no attempt to understand even the simplest of religious attitudes (does Dawkins really believe, as he says, that Christians should be thrilled to learn they’re terminally ill?).
And then he goes on to accuse Dawkins of having written a distinctly “middlebrow” book. (At the same time, I would want to challenge the claim, frequently made, that Augustine rejected literal interpretation. Like all biblical critics, to this day, Augustine could be as selectively literal as Pat Robertson. It depended on what “truth” he was trying to ground in the biblical witness.) The charge is very complex, and once again we have to ask what a study of these very complex questions and historical issues would have contributed to the task which Dawkins undertakes in The God Delusion. For instance, in the very next paragraph Orr says that
Dawkins’s discussion of religion’s power to console … is interrupted by the story of the Abbott [sic] of Ampleforth’s joy at learning of a friend’s impending death …
The point, though, surely, is that, like the early martyrs, many Christians have seen dying as a passage to a better life. Someone was quoted to that effect recently in relation to the silly prediction of Judgement Day on 21st May this year. The person, obviously disappointed, believed that heaven would be a better place. And if we are, as Paul says to the Corinthians, “longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling,” and that that would be far better than groaning in travail here, in what way is it unreasonable for Dawkins to think that Christians ought to be thrilled on learning that they are going to die? As a priest it was impossible for me not to notice the contradiction between what I often said in church and how I lived the rest of the week. That is simply unavoidable, and anyone who is a religious believer is often struck by the inconsistency between life as it needs to be lived, as, it seems, it can only be lived, and life as one’s religious beliefs demand that it should be lived. There are all sorts of fudges used to hide the inconsistency, but it would be foolish to deny that the inconsistency exists. The inconsistency, of course, leads to a perpetual state of dissatisfaction and sense of failure, which is why, no doubt, at the centre of the Christian liturgy lies the acknowledgement of sin and the desperate appeal for salvation.
But, as for the subtleties and meticulousness of theological argument, for which, Orr alleges, Dawkins substitutes personal reminiscence, “extraneous quotation, letters from correspondents, and, most of all, anecdote after anecdote,” let me consider, for a moment, a chapter in Marilyn McCord Adams book, Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God. The title of the fourth chapter is “Divine Agency Remodelled.” It consists of a discussion of ways of conceiving god which would help to circumnavigate the issues that are raised by the problem of evil. Take this as a representative passage:
Parties to the debate Mackie spawned seem mostly to agree both that only persons are moral agents, and that any and all persons — no matter whether human, angelic, or Divine — are moral agents, networked into a system of mutual rights and obligations. One sure way to skirt his logical problem of evil, along with the tangle of “damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t” estimates of God’s moral obligations, would be to deny that God is personal at all (in the sense of an agency that acts through thought and choice). [64]
Now, my point is this. Here is a kind of theological argumentation. A philosopher takes the standard understanding of god as a personal being who acts, whose purposes are benevolent, and who is all-powerful. Given that understanding, the problem of evil appears insurmountable (as I believe it is). So, what must the theologian do? Simple. Just redefine god. Call god the ground of being, or, as one theologian does, “secure a distinctive locus for Divine personal agency by deploying the spatial metaphors of distinct axes, planes, or levels,” (68) and — what do you know? — problem solved! I don’t want to overdramatise the point, but clearly the theologian believes that, whatever else god is, the concept of god is to an astonishing degree a plastic one which can be moulded into various shapes in order to deal with objections that are brought to bear against this or that aspect of god when seen in relationship to earthly things and happenings. I don’t want to deny that theology may, like the study of any myth, provide insights into the depth of what it means to be human; but that does not help the theologian qua theologian, who is endeavouring to say something that is true about a being (or being itself) which it calls god. Models of god may help us to skirt the issues raised by philosophers, but without any means of assessing whether the model is actually a model of something — even if this some “thing” does not exist in the ordinary sense as one entity amongst others, but underlies them as their ground — does theology have a subject matter? I don’t think Orr or Eagleton (and others) take this problem with sufficient seriousness.
As to Orr’s more substantial concerns, I remain unimpressed. For instance, he suggests that Dawkins’ central argument about the improbability of the God Hypothesis suffers from two major flaws. Take one:
… if he is right, the design hypothesis essentially must be wrong and the alternative naturalistic hypothesis must be right. Buit since when is a scientific hypothesis confirmed by philosophical gymnastics, not data?
Well, but this is not an argument. Dawkins is not saying that the naturalistic hypothesis is confirmed by philosophical gymnastics, for he begins with it. He takes Darwinism for granted throughout. Recall that Hume thought the religious hypothesis was wrong, but didn’t have the means to show it. He hovered on the verge of evolutionary theory, but could not think of a mechanism by which apparently designed beings came to be without a designer, so Philo caved in to Cleanthes. Once you know that the apparent design of the universe, including life, has a perfectly reasonable scientific explanation, the question of the designer — no longer necessary — becomes a question of how likely it is that a designer should exist.
Take two:
Second, the fact that we as scientists find a hypothesis question-begging — as when Dawkins asks “who designed the designer?” — cannot, in itself, settle its truth value. It could, after all, be a brute fact of the universe that it derives from some transcendent mind, however question-begging this may seem.
Doubtless that is true, but if you are setting out to explain something, and there is reason for holding that your explanation itself needs an equivalent explanation, then, in the absence of any evidence that the regress simply stops — viz., that it just is a brute fact that it does — the explanation explains nothing. Orr asks in rebuttal:
Why, for example, is Dawkins so untroubled by his own (large) assumption that both matter and the laws of nature can be viewed as given? Why isn’t that question begging?
Well, perhaps it is, but Dawkins is not saying that the explanatory task is complete. There is no doubt more to know. Abiogenisis, for instance, is still a question of some importance. Some religious believers want to hang their religious belief on the supposition that how life began is somehow inexplicable without god, but that is truly question begging, just as Dembski’s irreducible complexity is. It is an invitation to stop looking. Dawkins is not begging the question in that way. The scientific quest goes on. It is not clear that theology is a quest.
Next, Orr criticises Dawkins for lack of imagination, for thinking of religious believers in quite unqualified, simplistic terms, as though American fundamentalists, with their theocratic right-wing views and literalist understanding of the Bible, are representative of religious believers as a whole. More nuanced possibilities escape him, such as “varieties of deism, mysticism, or non-denominational spirituality.” Indeed, poverty of imagination is not all that Orr finds troubling about Dawkins’ criticisms of religion:
It’s hard to resist the conclusion [he writes in the peroration to the third section] that people like James and Wittgenstein struggle personally with religion, while Dawkins shrugs his shoulders, at least in part because they conceived possibilities — mistaken ones perhaps, but certainly more interesting ones — that escape Dawkins.
A Luddite or a cultural Philistine, then, who is simply not interested? Yet Dawkins would have taken “Mache dich mein Herze rein” from Bach’s St Matthew Passion to his desert island. (TGD 86) This does not seem like someone incapable of nuance or imagination, nor, if you read his wonderful books, like The Blind Watchmaker, is there any sign of lack of imagination and wonder. Perhaps Orr is just not paying attention to what Dawkins is trying to do, and who he is appealing to. There are, I should think, at a rough estimate, millions of people who are caught between the devil and a hard place, people for whom religion is empty and meaningless, but who are bound to religious traditions and religious affirmations which they dare not, for many reasons, publicly question. If doubt is an essential part of religious faith, as so many of Dawkins’ detractors claim, then this doubt must have carried many of them over into real, corrosive doubt, even though they remain trapped within networks of beliefs and believers which they feel unable to escape. Providing subtle distinctions in such a context would not help. It would bind the believer that much more inescapably to the wheel of affirmation and reaffirmation, however desperate they may be to escape the trammels of religious belief and the sometimes cloying web of religious community.
I will not follow Orr into the last section of his review. It is important, but we can come back to that another time. Whether a world without religion would be a better one is certainly worth asking. Whether Dawkins is a bit naive in supposing that it would be greatly better may certainly be discussed. But that religion is now, at this present time, a threat to world peace and human rights, seems to me irrefragable. I write this blog because I want to see laws regarding assisted dying become the norm. I believe that opposition to reasonable and compassionate assisted dying legislation is almost entirely religious — though there are some outriders in secular movements which, for inadequate reasons (see my own criticism of Jennifer Michael Hecht), oppose assisted dying legislation, or at least would limit it in serious and, I believe, unjustifiable ways. This is only one example of religious regressive effect on law and society. It is a simple one, but it is characteristic. The religious believe that they have final answers to some of our most pressing social and personal problems. For some, obviously, religious answers do provide the basis for personal revaluation and change. The real problems arise when religion interferes uninvited in the lives of others, and the problem is that religion simply cannot help itself. Since it believes in moral absolutes which must be applied whatever the consequences, religion is in the forefront of forces which would limit human freedom and subvert open societies. These are things which I believe that Orr does not see as clearly as he should.
“extremists sail with impunity through waters that are, from their own point of view, filled with apostates, but apostates who supinely allow themselves to be used as a cover for extremist views.”
The waters can be divided in two ways. The more popular way of course is to combine liberal believers with the more fundamentalist variety and thus get a huge total. But if you combine liberal believers with non-believers, naturally that changes the stats.
In short, it’s a matter of whose thumb is on what scale.
(My thinking is that a lot of “liberal believers” aren’t stricly speaking believers at all, they’re more like compliers, practitioners, go alongers, as if believers, and so on. They really should be counted with non-believers for most purposes – but they generally aren’t.)
Yes, I agree, but, you see, if you listen to liberals defend religion, they often don’t make clear distinctions here, and so, like Chamberlain, find themselves playing footsy with Hitler. (By the way, I sneaked into your note and edited my words. It’s difficult to do proof reading oneself, and I sometimes don’t see it, even when it’s staring me in the face — in place of ‘used for cover for’ it should have been ‘used as a cover for’.)
Heh. Quite all right to sneak into my note.
I know, about the liberals. They’re often (or many of them are) as keen to count that way as the core believers are. The orientation is all pro-”faith” – which is why I find it so irritating. Pro-faith “atheists” like Chris Stedman are forever embracing believers while kicking atheists. The hell with that!
Eric, you indeed write quite well, and clearly (excepting the occasional typographical error), and I wanted to thank you for something. As per usual, I’m loquacious. Sorry.
Let me say why any of this even important to me (not the science the bit, but the god bit). I have never found a particularly artful way of saying other than to be crass: this shit matters because other people are willing to fucking kill me (and everyone else) to make me believe. You did quite a bit better, and I am grateful for the language, “The fact that religious believers and compromising atheists do not seem fully aware of the problems that religions threaten in a world where weapons are more abundant than ideas . . .” So, I’ll be making a mental note of that for in my times of frustration where the only response I feel like giving is in keeping with the crass one of a moment ago. I will, of course, properly cite to you as its author.
Anyway, I appreciate the reflection, context and shade of this article. It is, to my mind at least, the best I’ve yet read from you.
It is unfortunate for me, perhaps, that you started this website with respect to its central mission. Make no mistake, I fully and unconditionally support the so-called right to die (as though it’s something that someone can actually permanently deprive one of). In my home state, we enacted legislation making it perfectly legal (though with more rigorous hoops for the circus poodles to have jump through than one should like to have to put up with when contemplating death is a welcome conversation) by a fairly large margin, about 60% of the voters in favor, and about 75% of the counties in favor. We have a lot of recounts here, but not on this.
Alas, the reason I say it’s unfortunate is that I have nothing to say on the matter other than it’s quite a bit silly, and deeply immoral, to give one person an executive veto (for that matter, even the slightest notion that they’re entitled to have an opinion deserving any measure of consideration at all, in the first place) on another person’s ability to say s/he’s suffered enough and wants out. Of course, this is a cornerstone of any religion worth noticing: they’re so concerned with their god that they have all the time in the world to make sure a.) they know what everyone else up to in matters that are private, and b.) want to meddle in those matters after being cordially invited to get out.
Of course, my opinions on the matter can likely do you no good since I’m not from your country. But I hope reason prevails, sooner rather than later.
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I’m enjoying this series Eric and quite amazed at the rate you’re turning out the articles.
I have a question regarding related to the “sea of apostates” that Ophelia commented on above. I’ve heard Anglican clergy use “that’s not my god” and “that’s not what people really believe” responses to points raised by Dawkins et al. but when you compare those responses to what they recite every time the celebrate communion, the two sides of what they claim to believe depending on the occasion are worlds apart. Don’t they feel their hypocrisy? Doesn’t the cognitive dissonance jar them? How do they manage to reconcile those beliefs and go on preaching what they so quickly deny when pressed?
Indeed. To incorporate your own eloquent prose, if theology is not an intellectual discipline which actually confirms or disconfirms propositions on the basis of things external to the manipulation of expressions within the discipline, what is the value of engaging it, or even of knowing it beyond historical interest in understanding how it has evolved.
Well said. Being faith-friendly involves offering support for faith, not for the faithful.
So many words trying to wave away the obvious fact: Dawkins is right.
There is no god; not even theirs. Religion is demonstrably a societal negative. It is a dangerous anachronism from our left-over primitive past.
If it were merely an anachronism, like astrology, then no one would bother to complain about it. I don’t get exercised about the daily horoscope in my local newspaper. Because the astrologers don’t tell us how to vote, who to love, how to live.
And as far as invoking the “serious” theologians, one has to ask: why? If there’s something in their writing that is so compelling, so straightforward, so sensible, then why doesn’t everyone in the world know it? Seems to me that if any of the “serious” theological writings had anything of value, they’d be abstracted and shared widely throughout the world.
The absence of this type of discourse is not the fault of atheists. It’s not even, to be frank, the fault of the theologists themselves.
It’s the fault of theology. Although, to be fair, the fact that atheists are more than willing to peek behind the curtain at the humbug doesn’t help.
Does Orr really criticise Dawkins for not considering nuanced possibilities escape him, such as “varieties of deism, mysticism, or non-denominational spirituality”?
Surely, Dawkins states early on in TGD that he’s not talking about deism — iirc, there’s some reference to Einstein’s or Spinoza’s God.
I’m not sure that mysticism qua mysticism or non-denominational spirituality (whatever spirituality is) qualify as a religion — or as nuanced. Mysticism sounds anti-rational to me, so I’m sure Dawkins wouldn’t advocate it, but neither is it as damaging to society and humankind as theistic religion is. Spirituality might come from contemplating the awe and majesty of the universe, so this might imply a kind of pantheism — which, I think, Dawkins called “sexed-up deism” — which is, then, also ruled out. How else might spirituality arise? I don’t know.
On another point, Dawkins ignorance of sophisticated theology. Well, we already have the Courtier’s Reply. But another analogy struck me, and a relevant one. It would be easy to dismiss the geocentric model of the solar system as wrong because it doesn’t correctly explain the apparent motions of the planets relative to the starry firmament. But a sophisticated geocentric model adds epicycles to the planets’ orbits around the earth, then adds epicycles to the epicycles, and so on. Now the geocentric model can (to a degree of accuracy limited by the number of epicycles) explain the motion of the planets! But it is still wrong!! The heliocentric model is right: It describes the motions of the planets simply and elegantly: “Nevertheless, the Earth moves.”
(As an aside, it always struck me as odd that no-one had proposed the “accommodationist” model, with the moon and sun orbiting the Earth, and the other planets orbiting the sun. Which is just the heliocentric model with a different frame of reference, but potentially more acceptable to the Christian theocracy.)
/@
*strike “escape him” (Post-paste edit error!)
*qualifies as a religion
Ant, you’re kidding, aren’t you? Tycho Brahe proposed exactly such a system.
While the objection that Dawkins didn’t do justice to the most sophisticated notions of God is duly regarded as the courtier’s reply, it may be worthwhile to consider why the objection is advanced.
“The God Delusion” is a popular work, like Dawkins’ previous publications, which weren’t savaged for failing to conform to academic standards of rigor. It was accepted that they were pitched to a general audience, part of a genre which is well understood.
TGD, though, is treated by many as a work of authority, such that any fault undermines its value. As little sense as such objections make to us, they matter a lot to the authoritarians who are the target of this pitch.
Shorter: The Godly think Dawkins is our gospel and play Gotcha!
Indeed. I wonder if there is some philosophical observation which suggests that if no simple evidence can be found which supports an idea, then more complex versions of the idea are futile?
On a more earthly plane I have difficulty ‘hearing’ the lyrics of songs or identifying words in foreign languages. I might be able to overcome this limitation by study and effort (if I was determined enough) but I have other more rewarding things to do which I find easier. Arguing that I might struggle with popular music but I should really make the effort to understand more sophisticated opera just doesn’t make sense.
I suspect that that Richard Dawkins feels no emotional attachment to the idea of a god – why should he invest time and effort in more sophisticated theology? Arguably his critics should also study other sophisticated theologies for other gods too – or do they limit their investigations to what they are comfortable with too?
The question I find most difficult to answer is the question from believers who believe what makes them comfortable and claim to reject what makes them uncomfortable: why do try to push your nonbeliefs on us when we don’t tell you what to believe?
I find it difficult to explain to them that relgion and belief by their very pervasiveness are pushed on everyone. Selectively religious people seem to think that as moderates they shouldn’t be criticized, that they need to believe in something.
A young man who claims to be an atheist asked me why I want to criticize and attack priests and the church. He asks why I don’t just ignore them? He belongs , of course, to the Neville Chamberlain school of apologetics. I tell him he is a fence sitter.
Actually, I wasn’t. Honestly, I’d never come across the Tychonic system before. All the (popular) accounts of the history of astronomy I’ve read (not a huge number!) have, as far as I can recall, jumped straight from the Ptolemaic geocentrism to Copernican heliocentrism, without mentioning it.
But I’m happier now, knowing about it. You’ve dispelled that disquieting feeling of oddness. (Which, however, was never disquieting enough to motivate me to investigate the matter!)
It’s astonishing what you can completely overlook for 50 years.
/@
Of course, the first astronomy book I pull off my bookshelves, The Atlas of the Solar System by Patrick Moore and Garry Hunt, does mention it (p. 20). But I doubt that I ever read that cover to cover…
Hey-ho.
:-/
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I wish someone would come up with an appropriate term for those theologians who appear on talk shows and in intellectual journals on Saturday to criticize the Dawkins et al of this world for their lack of understanding of deeply sophisticated theology, and yet who sit comfortably in the pews on Sunday and listen while the designated spokesman of their belief explains how it’s absolutely certain that “the negative unknowable all-encompassing ground of being” really hates the idea of two queers getting married or a lesser creature such as a woman handling the Sacred Objects.
A series of exchanges between H.Allen Orr and Daniel Dennett originating in Orr’s review:
http://www.edge.org/discourse/dennett_orr.html
Recall that Hume thought the religious hypothesis was wrong, but didn’t have the means to show it. He hovered on the verge of evolutionary theory, but could not think of a mechanism by which apparently designed beings came to be without a designer, so Philo caved in to Cleanthes.
I agree with you about this, and it is fascinating to read Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for hints of Hume’s pre-Darwinian outlook. For example, one argument that Philo puts forward in favour of design is that no species are known to have gone extinct. That certainly changed by the time Darwin was finding megafauna fossils in South America.
As a priest it was impossible for me not to notice the contradiction between what I often said in church and how I lived the rest of the week.
Eric, are you referring specifically to human feelings about death, or are there more contradictions you’re thinking of? I’d love to know some details.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
Philo:
[207]
…
So well adjusted are the organs and capacities of all animals, and so well fitted to their preservation, that, as far as history or tradition reaches, there appears not to be any single species which has yet been extinguished in the universe…
Ant Allan,
That model was allegedly proposed to Galileo by one of his persecutors as a way of salvaging his math and predictions without contradicting scripture. All you have to do is throw in a relativizing axiom or two, and poof, the two theories are observationally indistinguishable—-the Earth is stationary and everything else orbits it in just such a way that it looks just like the Earth and planets orbit the Sun.
Galileo quite rightly wouldn’t go for that “minor” adjustment to his theory.
It’s a good metaphor for the kind of bogus “compatibility” of science and religion that accommodationists often talk up.
A lot of very basic religious beliefs are “unfalsifiable” if and only if you make up stuff to explain away the observations, or the lack of observations of things that should be observable. That is supposedly an okay way to make science and religion “compatible.”
Such accommodationism is wrong; it guts the central scientific principle of falsifiability.
Science is not neutral toward such conveniently unfalsifiable hypotheses, supported by unevidenced and unparsimonious assertions. In general, we have to guess that they are probably wrong, or worse than wrong.
(That’s what “paradigm failure” is about.)
Supernaturalism is a failed paradigm, and the continuing success of naturalism is evidence against it. (Even the accommodationists’ favorite philosopher of science, Barbara Forrest, admits that.)
I’ve also noticed that ‘sophisticated theology’ is what makes people fall asleep in church. The stuff that Dawkins and the New Atheists crush is still the stuff that gets taught to children. My parents were happy to admit that The Flood, and Genesis weren’t real, but that’s only after I asked. Its not like religious authorities are taking down the images of the bearded God and replacing it by a multiplanar entity made of Love and Justice. They only bust out these ‘sophisticated’ explanations for people that are smart enough to know that the early childhood explanations make no sense. And most people just wave them around like totems.
Last week they had a big discussion at the Wash Post’s On Faith section about Hawking dismissing heaven, and it was funny that when I actually got into lengthy discussions with religious people, they would turn on ‘sophisticated theology’ and ask me to read it, but would completely refuse to summarize it. One even said it was ‘not his job to do the work for me’. I suspect he didn’t fully understand them, or realized that if you put it in clear language, in bullet points, it wouldn’t be any different from childish theology.
Arguably his critics should also study other sophisticated theologies for other gods too – or do they limit their investigations to what they are comfortable with too?
Yes, the critics who use the Courtier’s Reply have no trouble dismissing Odin, Isis, Ishtar, Zeus. Shiva, Krishna and any other gods, whose cults are either extinct or extant, which they themselves do not believe in. Sauce for the goose…..
If simply saying “I don’t think God exists and here’s why” is “pushing your nonbeliefs” on someone, then every believer who asserts God exists is being equally pushy. And even if the person asking the question isn’t personally doing that in public, others definitely are.
Doesn’t “hypocrite” work for this purpose?
Sophistitheists?
The Sophisticrats?
The Ground of all Bigots?
As plastic as the definition of God might be, does changing the definition really help dodge the Problem of Evil/Suffering?
By saying that God is the ground of all being, aren’t we really just making excuses for God’s inaction? It sounds like a way of saying that God is amoral or perhaps, if god must regulate natural laws and so never perform miracles, God is unable to help. Either way, the redefinition doesn’t answer anything.
Eric,
If you’d like to explain what theologians mean by “ground of being,” and why you’d call that God, I’d be interested.
I sorta gave it a stab in this comment at B&W…
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2011/like-the-force-but-without-the-lightsabers/#comment-87623
…but I’m nowhere close to an expert, and I’d be interested in your more theologically informed views.
I’m interested in trying to come up with a taxonomy of “sophisticated theology,” especially with regard to the key issue of dualism, and whether anybody ever worships something that isn’t assumed to be supernatural, even if it’s not called that. (In very much the sense of Pascal Boyer and Richard Carrier, where supernatural entities are unconsciously assumed to have irreducibly mental or teleological properties, even if they’re overtly not minds or persons.)
If I’m wrong and there are theologians who talk about God without sneaking in dualistic presuppositions, I’m quite curious to know what the heck they are talking about.
Part of the point of speaking about the ground of being is to distinguish god from things that exist. In this guise, ie, as the ground of being, whatever god is — and this is the most unsatisfactory part of this idea of god — god does not exist, and cannot be treated like any other existent. In other words, a catalogue of existing things might include ships, sealing wax, trees, planets, galaxies, ……., but god would nowhere appear as an existent. But from this point of view, god is the ground of existence. He enables existing things to be. What, in this context, is god? Not sure. It seems to put god beyond accessibility by the human intellect. However, if you accept this, then in fact the whole of “creation” — and creation becomes an ongoing process in ground of being terms — is somehow instinct with god, though it is hard to say exactly what this means as well. I’m not convinced, in the terms of your note at B&W, that the relationship is one of supervenience. In fact, I don’t think it is. It’s a grounding relationship, certainly, such that, without the ground, nothing would exist, but, as in a sense being itself, the ground is not something — like atoms or electrons — upon which something might supervene (as composed of those things). The ground is more integrally related to existence than that, and yet, at the same time, since it does not itself exist, it is, in some sense, more distant too. I don’t think the term makes sense.
Nor, by the way, can it function as the Star Wars “Force”. There would be no point in saying, “May the ground be with you,” since, so long as you exist, it must. Nor is there any clear sense in which the ground could be said to guide or direct existence. It’s something like a bare potentiality the other side of which is the actuality of existence. In that sense, I suspect, it has no metaphysical work to do. That, I’m afraid, is a bit sketchy, but then it is sketchy, I suspect.
Eric did explain in a comment on that thread of Jerry’s – the one about the email from “reader” – that prompted my post. I forget exactly how it went, but I think it’s what you’re looking for.
Oops, never mind, I forgot to refresh, didn’t see that Eric had replied.
How is it possible to enable existing things to be without being (existing) oneself?
The ground of all being is that which enables things to exist, without itself existing. But if it doesn’t exist how can it “enable” anything? How can it do anything at all?
It looks like just stark nonsense; playing with words. Is that right? Or is there some subtlety I don’t understand?
In a way I feel as if there must be. But in another way I don’t.
Is it like being transcendent and immanent at the same time?
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Eek, that makes my head hurt.
That’s exactly what I was thinking when I called it an “accommodationist” model!
I agree with pretty much all you say.
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I picked that up from Biologos – some law professor at Seton Hall named David Opderbeck – it seemed so sophisticated that it had to be true or maybe just something he pulled out of his ass.
How is this distinguishable from deism?
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It’s a deepity!
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Bingo. I am fond of pointing out that there are three orthogonal questions that for some reason seem to get all lumped into one by a great many people:
Question #1: Are the truth claims of any given religion even remotely plausible? It never ceases to amaze me that apparently intelligent serious-minded adults don’t all come to the same (to me) obvious answer to this question.
Question #2: Is there anything intrinsic to religion that means it must always be a net positive or net negative? Or relatedly, does the “best possible world” include some form of religion, or doesn’t it? I consider this very much an open question. What solid data exists is very mixed in its conclusions. I think it would be elitist to assert without very solid proof that, e.g. “some people need comforting lies,” but then again I also don’t find the proposition impossible. People might have opinions on this question, but I think anyone — atheist or no — who is being fully honest must admit that we just really don’t know yet.
Question #3: Is religion as practice today a net positive or net negative? I think the answer to this is quite clear, and it is for this reason that I feel no qualms about advocating across the board for less religion, and certainly less influence of religion on the public conversation.
We don’t need to answer question #2 in order to feel confident advocating against religion strongly and universally. Dawkins, Hitchens, and other big names in atheism may have erred in overstating the validity of their gut feeling on this question, but it does not change the answer to questions #1 and #3 in the slightest.
And again, the fact that all these are separate, independent questions is too often lost.
Re Question #2:
Which is the best of all possible worlds, the one where Slartibartfast is happy or where he’s right?
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OK, thanks.
I think one relevant theological term (I forget whether philosophers usually call it something different) is “metaphysical priority.”
Something is metaphysically prior to something else if the latter can only exist in case the former exists.
For example, in Newtonian physics, space is metaphysically prior to distance, and space and time are both metaphysically prior to motion—you can’t have distance except in space, and you can’t have motion except through space, in time.
(Einsteinian physics is a bit different, but the same idea applies. You have world-lines extended through spacetime, so spacetime is prior to distance and motion, even if there are funny tradeoffs between space and time depending on frames of reference.)
This is the basic idea behind the Argument from Contingency, which is a non-temporal version of the Cosmological Argument. (The First Cause argument is the simple temporal one.) You look at stuff that can’t exist except by virtue of something “metaphysically prior” to it existing, and follow the dependencies back (“down”) until you get something that’s prior to everything else, and nothing is prior to it, and you call that God.
The most metaphysically prior thing, which is prior to everything else, is assumed to something you’d want to call God, as opposed to just being a merely weird thing that just is, and enables the existence of everything else, e.g., the basic laws of nature as described by a physical Theory of Everything.
It seems to me that there are fine philosophical puzzles about the most fundamental or metaphysically prior entities—e.g. in what sense do the most basic “laws of nature” exist, except as regularities among other things that exist?
Still, there’s no reason to call any of it God, and good reason not to, unless you assume that there’s Something More going on than physics—e.g., that the most fundamental thing is mental or mindlike, or has irreducibly mental or teleological properties. (Like Tielhard de Chardin’s inexorable tendency toward the Omega Point, which is something like a magical Lamarckian essence.)
Everything we know from science so far says that’s wrong. Goal-directedness is a very high-level property of complicated things, and as you go down through levels of metaphysical priority (or supervenience) you get to simpler and dumber things, nothing like minds or goal-seeking.
It seems to me that whether you talk about supervenience or about metaphysical priority, you have the same problem—it only works to call that God, and worship it, if you think of “more fundamental” things as ultimately reducing to something irreducibly mental or teleological. If you think of them as absolutely mindless and mechanical and goalless, it doesn’t seem the least bit God-like.
The plausibility of such interpretations depends, in turn, on believing in dualism, either overtly or covertly—buying some assumption that mere mindless material reality can’t be fundamental, and that it’s more plausible that something mindlike wills it into existence or directs it in interesting directions by virtue of its irreducibly interesting mind force or an irreducible tendency toward interesting forms.
In my limited exposure to sophisticated theology, it seems that such assumptions are always made, either explictly or implicitly. A theologian may say outright that mere matter couldn’t just be, and must have been willed or thought into existence by a Creative Essence or The Logos or whatever, or may just blithely identify the most metaphysically prior thing with God without any real argument, and at some point start ascribing mental or teleological properties to it.
If I’m right, there is always an inversion of the scientific view that material reality is temporally and metaphysically prior to mental or teleological properties. If there’s not, it just doesn’t feel right to call it God and worship or revere it, and you’re left with atheism.
Orr’s review really set me off for, among other things, slagging Douglas Adams as middlebrow compared to [historically known philosopher X]. Aside from the fact that Adams was an exceptionally clever writer whose talent qua writer far surpasses most philosophers and all of Dawkins critics, and aside from the fact that there wasn’t a single substantive refutation of the points on which Dawkins quoted Adams, it was a supremely ungracious dig given the circumstances. Adams had died a few years before the book was published and it was clear to me that Dawkins had taken the opportunity to eulogize his friend a bit. The mean-spiritedness of those trying to take Dawkins to task for vitriol still blows me away.
No Michael – it’s like being numinous and ineffable at the same time.
This is one of the best wanks I’ve seen for some time – kudos all!
I really don’t get this argument, ever.
Theology: What’s the stitching like on the emperor’s clothes. Cumberbund or robe? Handkerchief in the pocket?
Gnu Atheist: Show us the god damned (pun intended) emperor before we comment on his clothes.
Eric, can I just say how wonderful your pieces are. It looks like a labour of love, or at least a great deal of labour, as I don’t know how you can write so many superb pieces.
However, I don’t think these critics of Dawkins care at all about truth, or have any sympathy for what Dawkins attempted to do with TGD. I think they are practising the age old art of suppressing the voice of difference.
I watched an old documentary about the Spanish surrealist artist Luis Buñuel, and one of his movies was simply banned for being critical toward religion, and another project was shut down because it was too atheistic.
That’s how religious people work: they shut down our voices, and that is the reason for all these works, which will likely be read instead by the very audience that Dawkins was aiming for. It’s something we have to constantly struggle against.
As Massimo Pigliucci put it in Nonsense On Stilts: “How is it even possible to become an expert in nonsense?”
When we want to look at the validity of astrology, we don’t consult the various books on astrology. Instead we understand the motion of stars and planets. We understand about the mind and how it forms patterns. We test whether personality is linked to a person’s star sign. We don’t need to worry about what the significance of Pluto’s proximity to Capricorn or whether we are in the age of Aquarius. It’s simply not relevant to the question of the truth of astrology…
Perhaps the best way to illustrate the problem is by demonstrating what relevance theology has to the debate. It would benefit everyone to show what theology brings to the discussion and why its essential to grapple with. In the absence of that, appeals to “sophisticated theology” seem to be employed as a red herring.
Thank you, Egbert, for those kind remarks.
Don’t they feel their hypocrisy? No, not really. Been there, done that, and didn’t feel a hypocrite. I guess the truth is that theology is so convoluted, and there are so many escape clauses along the way, that you don’t really know what it is that you do or do not believe. It becomes more a matter of community than of conviction. However, it is not hard to keep things clear enough to be able to say what you don’t believe. That’s why people can say so clearly to Dawkins and others that, well, that’s not the god they believe in, because there is an intuitive conflict. However, ask them, “Okay, then, what do you believe?” That would be a harder question to answer.
The best possible world is the one where Slartibartfast is real. Assuming you have your towel, of course.
“I watched an old documentary about the Spanish surrealist artist Luis Buñuel, and one of his movies was simply banned for being critical toward religion, and another project was shut down because it was too atheistic.”
Egbert – I once got library loan of said surreal “Viridiana” banned film by Luis Buñuel. Highly recommended! Here’s some info pertaining to same. http://bit.ly/iRTT2E
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