I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion”. There is much to dislike about the book. Among the many reasons I dislike the book is Dawkins’ egotistical certainty. It’s off-putting.
The first, and easiest refutation of Dawkins is this, I believe: Dawkins spends the great bulk of his book refuting religion in general, and Christianity in particular. But religions are easy marks. Dawkins, if he is serious, should contrast atheism to theism. This, though, is much more difficult, and when he tries, he falls greatly short.
Dawkins says, for instance, that agnosticism is not rational. Agnostics must, he says, be able to make some kind of prediction as to the plausibility of God–and if they do, they will see that God is awfully improbable. But agnosticism is actually a perfectly reasonable position to hold–as Dawkins would know, if he were a little more sensitive.
Dawkins should know, because he contrasts science and religion, saying that science has much more majesty and is much bigger, better, and more profound. It has universes stacked like cells on a sponge, quarks that are in two places at once, space that bends. It is sublime. It is beautiful and amazing and, let’s be serious here–totally incomprehensible.
It is both incomprehensible in practice and in principle (although Dawkins would likely disagree about this latter point). In practice, I cannot understand the mysteries of the universe, and I’m reasonably bright and interested. And, of course, nobody can understand them all. Quantum physicists don’t understand quantum physics, let alone also understanding relativistic physics. It is, I think, pretty reasonable for any interested person to respond to any particular mystery with a shrug. Is the universe torus-shaped in all dimensions? Sure. Can time run backwards? OK. Are there n-dimensions joined by strings that cross space faster than light could travel? Why not? Is it possible there is a god? I guess.
Further, the universe is in principle incomprehensible. This is what Kant showed, to my satisfaction at least. We cannot understand, or perhaps even conceive things that do not fit into our phenomenal categories. Try understanding 4 dimensional space–and that’s an easy one. Nobody can; our brains are not wired for it. Try really getting your head around time running backwards, or infinities bigger than infinity. It can’t be done. And all of these are simple, pretty well explored scientific and mathematical theories. The noumenal world escapes us entirely. Could there be a god in it? Possibly. God, of course, could be far beyond our categorized understandings. It is, I think, perfectly intelligent to say that we just can’t know what is really in the noumenal world.
Finally, there is a good reason to dislike Dawkins’ personally. He is an elitist. In this video, he says he would like to study the correlation between IQ and religiosity. His conjecture is that smart people are atheists. Had Dawkins put a moment’s thought to it, he would have seen the stupidity of his conjecture. Newton: religious.The other inventor of calculus, Leibniz? Religious. Descartes, the inventor of modern geometry? Catholic. Da Vinci? Catholic. And on it goes, as it must. Of course, since most people who have ever been alive have been religious, most smart people were religious too.
In the video, he also says that politicians cannot be both smart and truthful–as they cannot admit to being atheists. This is, it seems, a great tragedy. We should, it seems, want smart, honest politicians.
Yet this way lies nastiness. For if we want smart politicians, we should want a smart electorate. And there is only one easy way to get that–limit the electorate.
Of course, the electoral system is not broken at all, or not in the way Dawkins suggests. We get the politicians we want–smart, honest, atheist or otherwise. And there is great reason to suppose that we do want something other than a smart politician. Smart people, after all, can be hired as advisors. Wise people are much harder to find. And I, at least, would trade a smart politician for a wise, kind, or modest one.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I’m an agnostic who, if pushed, admits to having atheistic tendencies.
One Comment
I have to disagree with a few points you made here, and I feel like responding to them:
1. Comparing smart theists people of ancient times, and by ancient I mean anything more than 100 years old, to theists of our time is not a valid comparison in my opinion. I would be a theist, and I would have written volumes on subjects such as the number of ferries who can dance in a needle’s hole, if I were living in a society where the punishment for questioning deities was beheading. That kind of punishment would limit the number of known atheists not only because they were afraid to announce their positions, but also because they had much less of a chance to re-evaluate their viewpoint on the matter. In other words, for most people, the choice between being a theist and an atheist was not an option, and it never occurred to them exactly because this was not, and could not, be the topic of discussion in the society.
What is true in our age, however, is the percentage of atheist scientists is rapidly increasing. There are references to statistics in the same book, The God Delusion, to support my claim. Therefore I think, too, that there is a correlation between atheism and knowledge of sciences and the power of analytical and critical thinking, which when put altogether, would constitute what we call smartness or talent.
2. Richard Dawkins agrees that the world may be incomprehensible in principle. Watch this video: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_our_queer_universe.html
3. I am a pacifist, as you might know, and I do not believe atheists should declare war on theists. I do not even think atheists should try to intimidate or offend theists, as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchenes do; but, if I were not, that is, if I believed in fair retaliation, if I believed in an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, I would say it is only fair if atheists would skin the theists, barbeque their flesh, and make toys out of their bones for children, because that is what they have been doing to their oppositions through out the history. Theists have made lives of billions of people in any religious state that I know of, or have heard of, so miserable and unbearable that no retaliation of religion, I suppose, would be sufficient. You might argue that dictators of history would have made lives miserable with or without religion, but religion has made it immensely easier and more justifiable for them to torture and terror.
4. I think Dawkins’ argument about agnosticism is valid. You do not say you are tooth ferry agnostic, even if you do not deny the existence of tooth ferries. I would say the existence of one single creator for the universe as we know it, is far more improbable than a tooth ferry, and therefore being a God-agnostic makes as much sense as being a tooth ferry agnostic.
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