Dissecting Dawkins
In the most recent issue of the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton shreds Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. His observations begin thus:
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
By comparison, Jim Holt’s review in today’s New York Times is mild — I almost said (God help me!) “Christian.”
Eagleton is blunt but largely on target–we subscribe to the LRB and I read his piece last week. One thing that is striking about the review is that Eagleton draws heavily on the thought of Herbert McCabe O.P. to make his case, much more heavily than the one explicit mention of Fr. McCabe might indicate.
Eagleton appears to embrace a sharp distinction between priestly and prophetic religion and along with Dawkins condemns the former without restraint. “Dawkins quite rightly detests fundamentalists,” declares Eagleton.
If Dawkins had condemned globalization or advocated income redistribution he perhaps would have received a more “Christian” reception from Eagleton. I wonder if Eagleton doesn’t share some of the same ignorance of his antagonists, conventional religion and what he calls “mealy-mouthed liberalism,” that he finds so exasperating in Dawkins.
I also noticed the favorable mention of Fr. McCabe in Eagleton’s review. Elsewhere I’ve seen references to McCabe’s influence on Alasdair MacIntire, Anthony Kenny and Seamus Heaney as well as Eagleton. Perhaps he’s due to be “rediscovered.”
While Dawkins finds the idea of God as “highly improbable.” he instead probably deserves every unfavorable rteview he gets. Still it’s important to distiunguish between his rejects of beleif in a deity and approaches to organized religions.
The Times review, i though, nicely skewered his poor approach to the former.
In our discussion, the prblem of Catholicism and its relationship to contemporary science creates more problems. How well we receive the findings of science and technological advance will certainly color the judgement of one deeply involved in scientific study – I see that in my own comunity. Fundamentalist are frequently laughed off if stuck in biblical literalism.
But beyond that, there is often enough a sense that the Church will take eons to acceopt a truth that seems to raise problems for its traditions.
Eagleton scores some major points, but his apparent biases in some areas, as noted by Patrick Malloy, detract from the overall force of his criticism.
Holt’s review seems less theologically surefooted than Eagleton’s, and he only nibbles at the edges of Dawkins’ argument by comparison, but Holt does have a great line about how neither believers nor atheists will ever be able post-mortem to say “I told you so” to the other:
“If the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right.”
Patrick Molloy:
It is true that Eagleton detests fundamentalists. He also thinks that Dawkins has a lot in common with them, or at any rate that is what I make of his comparison of Dawkins to Pat Robertson and American TV evangelists. But how do you conclude from his aversion to fundamentalists that he rejects priestly religion?
As for Fr. McCabe I discovered him in the TLS three or four years ago. He now has more books in print than at any time when he was alive. I think he has been rediscovered, or perhaps merely discovered. I recommend starting with the collection of pieces entitled God Matters. But be warned. He is, or at least was, a Socialist.
The title of McCabe’s wonderful book *God Matters* pulls off the remarkable feat of being a triple entendre. Bonus points to who can discern the third meaning. Hint: McCabe’s account of reality is very nearly Marxist.
Mr. Gannon,
How do I conclude that Eagleton rejects priestly religion? Several passages ir the review caught my eye. For example, I find this contrast needlessly stark: “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.” Likewise, the parts of the gospel message that Eagleton later emphasizes are curiously one-sided.
Perhaps I’m reading between the lines here (but I’ve read Eagleton enough to know his general approach). Of course when Eagleton makes Dawkins squirm I’m not unduly upset. At the same time I don’t want to enlist in all of Eagleton’s causes either.
If Fr. McCabe was a socialist that’s fine with me, though I would be curious about how he responded to the well-known difficulties of that creed. Only if he detested others at the same high decibel level of an Eagleton would I have misgivings.
First, Dawkins identified himself as a social democrat in one of his books, I believe The Selfish Gene. So, in response to Molloy, he has already advocated income redistribution. Socialists, as opposed to social democrats, don’t want to “redistribute income” but rather give workers control over the means of production –a much more than academic distinction. Capitalists can be social democrats, especially in Europe.
Second, it’s worth knowing or remembering that Eagleton has long had an interest in theology, from the 1960s onwards. His one book, The Body as Language, contains really remarkable accounts of ritual, sacramentality, etc. His later books, especially The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Sweet Violence and After Theory, exhibit a wide and deep erudition in theology and philosophy.
As for mlj’s assertion that McCabe is “nearly Marxist,” I don’t know what that charge means. (I suspect that people who make these charges know nothing of Marxism beyond Philosophy 101 boilerplate about “economic determinism.”) The “Marxism” in McCabe’s books would seem to stem from these astonishing assertions: that there’s something called class conflict, and that Christians can be socialists (note: socialists, not Marxists — there is a difference). By mlj’s standard, if one wants to call McCabe “nearly Marxist,” one should also indict Alasdair MacIntyre, who has nice things to say about Marx and Trotsky in After Virtue and other recent essays.
I’ll give the triple entendre challenge a try:
1. Matters used as a verb to mean God has importance.
2. Matters used as a noun to mean that God is the subject of discussion or consideration.
3. Matters used as an oxymoron. In Marx’ materialist view of reality, only matter exists. God is not composed of matter, and therefore He does not exist.
If it matters, feel free to point out the error of my ways. If it doesn’t, no matter. ;)
Since McCabe, O.P., was more nearly Thomist than Marxist, my Theology 101 reading of the third sense of God Matters is:
God makes matter to be.
Robert and Bill basically have it.
I think McCabe’s Marxism actually made his Thomism much more interesting, though not in the way one might expect. Where the Marxism is especially apparent is in how McCabe conceives of the relation between God and matter. It’s a completely orthodox undertanding, but one which uses Marx in a way that obviates many of the mistakes made by liberation theology. Wittgenstein is in the background too.
McCabe is still basically unread. I find this exciting.
See, isn’t this nice? We all agree McCabe possessed a brilliant Catholic intelligence and is somebody from whom many things are still to be learned.
This strikes me as a much better use of Commonweal’s valuable internet real estate space than… well….
“When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster”
Thankfully, anyone can and should comment on theology. Because theology demands commitment and embrace. Most of all, witness.
On that basis, Dawkins and Holt need to be addressed. Despite all their rational objections, their real and accurate objection is the abandonment of discipleship by too many of Jesus’ so called followers.
I am delighted also to find such agreement. McCabe was a brilliant theologian, wholly orthodox, with a remarkable sense of humor. He deserves to be more widely read and reread. He describes himself as a Socialist, but he is certainly in favor of a nonviolent approach to politics. The one essay of his I do not quite agree with is the one in which he says that the class struggle is a fact. I think there is some truth there, but I think he oversimplifies. But nobody is perfect.
Patrick Molloy,
You make your case, I think. I am not a follower of Eagleton, but I enjoy his book reviews. He has an eye for shoddy thinking and a way with words despite a tendency to go overboard. McCabe is a much more balanced thinker, sometimes too generous, perhaps, but if one has a fault it should be generosity.
I grew up around a lot of people like Dawkins in the Unitarian Church.
These were all extremely well-educated people, articulate and, almost invariably, as insufferably triumphal as any of my Baptist in-laws who spent most of this weekend’s family gathering reeling off the names of various family members on the fast train to Hell.
Like fundamentalists, the empiricists find it difficult to live without absolutes. The faith of the fundie is that it’s all right there in the Holy Bible. The faith the the empiricist is that there is a scientific explanation for everything, and we’ll figure it out as we get smarter and smarter.
Empiricists have their own sense of apocalypse, of a showdown between science and superstition that eventually blows all the incense and candle smoke out the window and lets in pure light, material comfort for all (through science!) and a race of good and kind people who have been cured of psychoses and criminality through genetics and natural selection.
My Baptist sister-in-law’s version of Heaven, where she will be a perfect size 6, able to eat as much chocolate ice cream as she wants, and where she and all her Baptist friends will sin no more is remarkably similar. Only the process by which this new world order comes about is different.
What I find interesting and sad is that organized religion largely creates people like Dawkins. Scratch any empiricist very deeply, and you’ll find someone damaged by a clergyperson, an evangelist or a religious nut somewhere along the line.
The Dawkinses of the world should remind us that God’s address is not just “Rome” but Everywhere, and Dawkins is as much his child as we are.
Over at the Mirror of Justice website there is a link to the Zenit website, which contains transcripts of a 10/9/06 mini-debate between Dawkins and an Irish columnist named David Quinn. The transcripts are very interesting reading, and, IMHO, Quinn inflicts some serious damage on several of Dawkins’ most cherished arguments.
Here’s the Zenit link, and then look for the links to “Are Believers Delusional? (Part 1)” and “Are Believers Delusional? (Part 2)”:
http://www.zenit.org/english/
From the reviews it seems that Dawkins’ latest book is similar in tone to “The Blind Watchmaker”. In that case, I felt his argumentation style resembled the iconoclasm of the dorm room bull sessions I used to hear in college forty years ago — the spoutings of half-educated undergraduates let off the authoritarian leash of parents, teachers and other authority figures for the first time.
That said, my experience is that atheists taken one at a time are no more or less arrogant about their beliefs than the rest of humanity. There are those among them who stand in awe of creation’s mystery and consider the quest for understanding to be unending but still do not believe. I cannot bring myself to look on that unbelief with condescention or contempt.
Antonio said: That said, my experience is that atheists taken one at a time are no more or less arrogant about their beliefs than the rest of humanity. There are those among them who stand in awe of creation’s mystery and consider the quest for understanding to be unending but still do not believe. I cannot bring myself to look on that unbelief with condescention or contempt.
Jean observes: I know and am related to many atheists who marvel at nature. What theywant to know is why its wonders have to be gussied up with a lot of supernatural nonsense and interwoven with ideas about ultimate good and evil.
For most atheists, religion is either a brick bat to beat up people you don’t like or a crutch like booze or drugs.
I respect their honesty about their unbelief–or what they think is unbelief. But that respect is generally not returned.