I have seen yet: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
- The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00, October 2006, ISBN 0 593 05548 9
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds,
and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins
on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the
nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand
Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what
they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be
understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they
invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would
make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest
religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If
they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of
South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously
as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old
travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the
sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval
heyday.
Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who
filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques
Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had
read more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be
excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to
receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of Human Nature.
There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave
in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of
academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers
it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the
writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.
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?
Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that he sets
up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this book;
but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are
absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous
amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both
parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins
rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.
A
molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice.
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and
Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the
dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have
always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites
us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of
science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be
sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most
sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins
lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no
unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to
entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’.
Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are
not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from
rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and
religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if
the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get
himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to
claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual
knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be
coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies
it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you
without being in love with you himself.
Dawkins holds that the
existence or non-existence of God is a scientific hypothesis which is
open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches that to claim that
there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is not at all the same
thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not
like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a
celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must
remain agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe
that he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks
they do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is,
which is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say
that religious people believe in a black hole, because they also
consider that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the
guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the
New Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for
Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political
criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God, but
this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of
international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific
hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe – even
though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had faith
in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have been
mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their
scientific hypothesis was unsound.
Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a
personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might
mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then
at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how
this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is
rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two
arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al
Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ‘existent’: in
one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious
types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the
condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves.
He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and
the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left
foot constitute a pair of objects.
This, not some
super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by the claim that
God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being by his love; and
this would still be the case even if the universe had no beginning. To
say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a measure of how very
clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of love rather than
need. The world was not the consequence of an inexorable chain of cause
and effect. Like a Modernist work of art, there is no necessity about it
at all, and God might well have come to regret his handiwork some aeons
ago. The Creation is the original acte gratuit. God is an artist who
did it for the sheer love or hell of it, not a scientist at work on a
magnificently rational design that will impress his research grant body
no end.
Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life,
which is the life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and
why science and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is
true of human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and
enjoyment but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be
ourselves. Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to
ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure
of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a
matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas
uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.
Dawkins,
who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his Creationist
opponents, understands nothing of these traditional doctrines. Nor does
he understand that because God is transcendent of us (which is another
way of saying that he did not have to bring us about), he is free of any
neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to love us.
Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in Hebrew) is
the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge, and Dawkins’s
God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false consciousness is
overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and
lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is the God of those
who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in
their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the
scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all their moral
shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed.
Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of
atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in
recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and
obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn’t
agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered
Jesus.
Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly
forward to death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise.
He does not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values
human life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The
suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr
surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate
well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as
sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically
incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired
his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers
deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in which
Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending execution.
They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross to make much
the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or masochistic, but
because the Roman state and its assorted local lackeys and running dogs
took fright at his message of love, mercy and justice, as well as at
his enormous popularity with the poor, and did away with him to
forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile political situation.
Several of Jesus’ close comrades were probably Zealots, members of an
anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas’ surname suggests that he
may have been one of them, which makes his treachery rather more
intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in bitter disenchantment,
recognising that he was not, after all, the Messiah. Messiahs are not
born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of destruction; and they tend
to ride into the national capital in bullet-proof limousines with
police outriders, not on a donkey.
Jesus, who pace
Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the Scriptures’ (he was a
devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new set-up), was a joke of a
Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a leader who understood, so it
would appear, that any regime not founded on solidarity with frailty
and failure is bound to collapse under its own hubris. The symbol of
that failure was his crucifixion. In this faith, he was true to the
source of life he enigmatically called his Father, who in the guise of
the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews that he hates their burnt
offerings and that their incense stinks in his nostrils. They will know
him for what he is, he reminds them, when they see the hungry being
filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. You are not
allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this God, since the only
image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for Christianity has to
do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the
poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ‘religious’ affair at
all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness
about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on Fridays is an
unscriptural church regulation.)
Jesus hung out with whores and
social outcasts, was remarkably casual about sex, disapproved of the
family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle queasy about this), urged us to
be laid-back about property and possessions, warned his followers that
they too would die violently, and insisted that the truth kills and
divides as well as liberates. He also cursed self-righteous prigs and
deeply alarmed the ruling class.
The Christian faith holds that
those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that
the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have
a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable
transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the
resurrection. Those who don’t see this dreadful image of a mutilated
innocent as the truth of history are likely to be devotees of that
bright-eyed superstition known as infinite human progress, for which
Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned
reformers or social democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply
isn’t radical enough.
The central doctrine of Christianity, then,
is not that God is a bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican
theologian Herbert McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if
you do, they’ll kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium
of the people. It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but
Marx, who in the same passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a
heartless world, the soul of soulless conditions’, was rather more
judicious and dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging,
flailing, mispunching Dawkins.
Now it may well be that all this is
no more plausible than the tooth fairy. Most reasoning people these
days will see excellent grounds to reject it. But critics of the
richest, most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a
moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather
than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so
much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream theology I have just
outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds it is in my view to
be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no religious belief,
anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect whatsoever. This, one
might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse to dogmatism. Even
moderate religious views, he insists, are to be ferociously contested,
since they can always lead to fanaticism.
Some currents of the
liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays degenerated into a rather
nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view this is no reason not to
champion liberalism. In some obscure way, Dawkins manages to imply that
the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for Osama bin Laden. His polemic
would come rather more convincingly from a man who was a little less
arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there are a mere one or two
gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who could refrain from
writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a particular scientific view]
can be answered by the suggestion . . . that there are many universes,’
as though a suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the
horrors that science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is
predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the
product of them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for
chemical warfare.
Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific
impartiality that in a book of almost four hundred pages, he can
scarcely bring himself to concede that a single human benefit has flowed
from religious faith, a view which is as a priori improbable as it is
empirically false. The countless millions who have devoted their lives
selflessly to the service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or
Allah are wiped from human history – and this by a self-appointed
crusader against bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with
the Gulag. Like the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even
where he is self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the
ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion
did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the time,
betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather
strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for
Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn’t know the difference between
a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican. He also
holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic
terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.
These are
not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the opinions of a
readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal rationalist.
Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou still
unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a
Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s
greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism,
anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines,
would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the
virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of
them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a
scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific
cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either
anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that I
use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical
sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where
he lives.)
There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion
springs from, among other places, that particular stable. At its most
philistine and provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann.
The secular Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which
advises us to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others,
are for the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests
fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have
never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism
that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation
that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it,
it’s all down to religion.
It thus comes as no surprise that
Dawkins turns out to be an old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to
global politics, believing in a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever
increasing progress, with just the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole
wave,’ he rhapsodises in the finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’
There are, he generously concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like
the present US government – as though that regime were an electoral
aberration, rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the
world order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we
can foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish
way, that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’
So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science
himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups like ecological
disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands, History is
perpetually on the up.
Apart from the occasional perfunctory
gesture to ‘sophisticated’ religious believers, Dawkins tends to see
religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not
only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more
reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and
not to the mass. The huge numbers of believers who hold something like
the theology I outlined above can thus be conveniently lumped with
rednecks who murder abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such
outrages go, however, The God Delusion does a very fine job
indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from
Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as
one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a
magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that particular
strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or
Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism
which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly or obnoxious
ideas just because they are other people’s. In its admirably angry way,
The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US
is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is
full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion, fundamentalist
or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe that a glorious
Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing their damnedest to
bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all this without being
so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific colleagues who
disagree with him, and without being so theologically illiterate. He
might also have avoided being the second most frequently mentioned
individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.
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