‘One meets closed minds.’
For those who missed it, Clifford Longley’s column in the November 28 issue of the Tablet does a good job of teasing out the absurdity in Richard Dawkins’s insistence that it is wrong to “indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents, and to slap religious labels on them” (as Dawkins puts in The God Delusion). “There is no such thing as value-free parenting,” Longley writes.
Simply to avoid all discussion of the parents’ religious beliefs…is to impart the clear and strong message that religion does not matter. Given that if it were true it would matter a great deal, that further imparts the message that religion is not true. That is, if you like, atheist indoctrination.
Longley proposes this as an argument about parenting, but it is hard to see why it wouldn’t also apply to education. If the argument doesn’t apply to education, why doesn’t it? If it does — and if it is a good argument — then people of faith have a compelling reason not to send their children to schools where the subject of religion qua religion is carefully avoided. One could, I suppose, argue that the tacit message of such schools is that religion is too important to get mixed up with the tedious but necessary stuff of primary education, but of course public schools approach important matters all the time, and cannot avoid doing so. However fastidiously they dodge metaphysical questions, they cannot dodge what Socrates called the most important question: how to live. Educators who think they do or can avoid this question are fooling themselves. And educators who answer this question while systematically avoiding religious questions inevitably impart the lesson that “religion doesn’t matter” — or at least not in the way most religious people think it does. If Christian claims are true, then, as Longley says, they matter a great deal, in ways that bear, directly and indirectly, on much of what students learn in an ordinary grade school. This is obviously not an argument against religious pluralism, but it may be an argument against Catholics’ accepting the most common way of accomodating religious pluralism in public schools.
Longley goes on to ask why so many vocal atheists seem so uninterested in conversation with believers.
[W]hy are atheists so passionate, indeed so irrational? I could not have an intelligent conversation with my father about religion, and I don’t suppose it would be any easier to have one with Polly Toynbee, A.C. Grayling, Richard Dawkins and the other evangelists of the New Atheism. With some of them I’ve tried. One meets closed minds.
That is what characterizes a fundamentalist — whereas I have to renew my Catholicism every day. The fact that today’s perfectly good answers are the same as yesterday’s does not exclude the possibility that one day they won’t be. Faith, as Pope Benedict has said, has to allow itself to be continuously interrogated by reason. It is as if atheists cannot bear the thought of their reason being interrogated by faith. As mine was; and faith broke through. Is this the possibility that really scares them?
When I read Longley’s Tablet piece, it reminded me of Terry Eagleton’s review (in the London Review of Books) of Dawkins’s God Delusion, which begins “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.” But then I haven’t read Dawkins, on theology or anything else, so maybe I’m missing something.
The review, if you nissed it, and various rejoinders are at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
The LRB, unlike its older sibling the NYRB, seems to allow free access to its articles!
I thoroughly agree with your application of this to education.
I would add that some public schools also teach a little bit about all religions except Christianity. In public grammar school, we had special sessions about Judaism because the teachers thought it would help us be less prejudice. But, I never learned a single thing about Islam or any other religion. My 5 year old nephew once went off about Kwanzaa at length. I also think that the idea that public schools should teach children about all religions, which will mean teaching that they are all equal, will naturally teach kids that no one religion can be true.
What are the remedies of this problem in a pluralistic society?
1. Vouchers for everyone to go to private schools, religious and non-religious.
2. European model: offer an optional additional class of religion, perhaps with some variation in the religious offerings depending on region.
3. Ontario (and Quebec?) model: Fully taxpayer funded religious schools parallel to public schools. (This would require a constitutional amendment, I think.) However, I hear these Catholic schools are basically secular anyway.
Longley goes on to ask why so many vocal atheists seem so uninterested in conversation with believers.
Well, I suppose one could ask how many believers are interested in conversations with atheists.
Even if they don’t know where it comes from (Psalm 14) most people probably know the saying, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” Why would an atheist want to have a conversation with people who believe that?
Maybe the books by the “new atheists” are all bad books. I have most of them, but I haven’t gotten around to reading them. But I would be much more confident that believers are being intellectually honest if they were to review a book by an atheist and say, “You know, it’s a really good book. He raises some very difficult questions in it, and to be honest, I don’t have answers for all of them. I still believe in God, but that book really put my faith to the test.” Instead the books by the “new atheists” have been dismissed as amateurish and laughably bad. One begins to wonder if the only really good books on atheism are written by believers who, by the end, conclude that only belief in God is tenable.
Of course, believers have been doing theology for thousands of years and have built up a very intricate system that has an answer for everything. Perhaps it is not necessary for an atheist to master theology and build an argument against it all. Maybe what’s important for them to say is just, “I don’t believe.” I certainly have times when I doubt the existence of God. Even Mother Teresa did. At the core, how much is belief or unbelief a matter of intellectual understanding? Isn’t it more about a gut feeling?
Longley didn’t understand the “Don’t Label Me” campaign. Probably was unwilling to understand it. The campaign was to raise awareness of the negative connotations of labelling children as “Catholic children” or “Protestant children” or “Muslim children” etc. The campaign said nothing about parenting. Dawkins is right. Children are not Muslim or Catholic or Protestant. I fail to see how anyone could disagree with the sentiment of the campaign.
The campaign also took place in the UK, which has a significant number of state funded faith schools, Catholic, Anglican, Muslim etc. In Northern Ireland, state schools are usually defined by religion, and this has been one of the central reasons for segregation and bigotry in the country.
As for “[W]hy are atheists so passionate, indeed so irrational?” How are atheists such as Dawkins irrational? What specific irrational position has he taken?
“I certainly have times when I doubt the existence of God. Even Mother Teresa did.”
I’m not knocking your candid comment about doubt, David (I had about a 10-year interlude with agnosticism myself), only noting that Mother Teresa never doubted God’s existence during her decades of feeling estranged from God. The remarkable thing was how she persevered and never once wavered in her belief despite her profound feeling of a loss of connectedness with God.
Mother Teresa never doubted God’s existence during her decades of feeling estranged from God
In my experience, atheists thirst for a level of fundamentalism in religion that only a zealot could match. And I don’t say this to be glib. Like all New Yorkers, I have atheist friends by the droves. Many, many of them disbelieve, in a real sense, because God doesn’t act like the “bully in the sky” they read about in the Old Testament. I think they would be perfectly content to believe in and worship a God who smote the unjust the instant they transgressed, but because this does not happen, they believe in nothing.
This fundamentalist instinct is sated, it seems, by the belief in the power of unadulterated “reason.” The world must, must, must function according to rules, and those rules must be accessible to empirical testing. That which is not empirical is not real. In reason, there is a god that is knowable.
I only wish it were a caricature.
I don’t think Dawkins is a good example of an atheist – he tends to speak against religious fundamentalists, and he’s sort of an atheist fundamentalists himself. There are atheists who do makes very good arguments against the existence of an all good, all powerful God who allows evil and suffering. I don’t think it’s unusual or wrong to have doubt.
“One could, I suppose, argue that the tacit message of such schools is that religion is too important to get mixed up with the tedious but necessary stuff of primary education”
No, this is a poor way of stating the argument. Religion should not be addressed in grade school not because of any notions regarding its importance but simply because it us beyond the ability of pupils of that age to cogitate profitably about the subject.
Many, many of them disbelieve, in a real sense, because God doesn’t act like the “bully in the sky” they read about in the Old Testament.
Thomas,
Excuse me, but was the God of the Old Testament not God? Has the bully God of a few thousand years ago mellowed into a nice God? Weren’t the Hebrew Scriptures the only account of God that Jesus and the Apostles knew? Don’t we still read the Old Testament today?
The question in the mind of your atheist friends may be, “Why was God so present and visible to both his enemies and friends alike in Old Testament times, and why is he so invisible now? That’s the primary question. The secondary question is why did God command people to do things like slaughter men, women, children (and the cattle, too) in the Old Testament when the idea horrifies us today?
I think it would be a good thing to teach world religions in public schools just in the interest of creating educated people. Religion sure does shape the world; it is something young people should know about. I think the obstacle to teaching it, though, isn’t limited to the objections of atheists, but also to people who are strong believers (of various faiths) who don’t want their children exposed to other belief systems.
I send my children to parochial school even though I have a great public school in my neighborhood. I’m struck by the enthusiasm my children have for God, and the complete confidence they have that the world makes sense and that it is a good place and God is looking out for us. I think it is a terrific thing for little kids to feel safe and confident; it will help them become strong adults, I hope, when they will then be better able to figure out for themselves why the world maybe doesn’t always make sense.
I’m neither an atheist nor a typical Christian (The Gospel of Thomas speaks to me more than the canonical alternatives), but I think I can speak for a good number of people who don’t care to spend time listening to arguments supporting the Nicene Creed or the Gospel of “John”. It has nothing to do with fear or irrationality; on the contrary, it involves a healthy and secure attraction to the Nature we’re blessed to experience (its goods and bads) for our limited time on earth, and a healthily rational aversion to re-hashing old debates with as much evidentiary merit as those supporting Nostradamus or astrology. Simply put, the appeals to cathartic emotion and scriptural authority don’t work any more; Nature and mortality have their own emotional appeal, at least as beautiful and poignant as those of the sacrifice; and science (and skepticism) carry more authority than revelation in this space age (yes, warts and all — the history of Christendom reminds us every age has its warts, secular or religious).
Then there’s a knowledge of history, and of religion’s role in it. It’s very important that this history be taught and known to avoid a return to new Crusades, 30 Years Wars, Inquisitions, anti-science campaigns, on and on (I just taught Galileo to my Western Civ students today. Religion is very important.).
Finally, some people may have simply lived more worldly lives, and less New York City-bound ones. We’ve seen Islam as the norm in the Muslim countries we’ve lived in, and Buddhism and Hinduism in other parts of the world we’ve called home. We’ve seen the impressively harmonious and ethical belief system of what Reagan loved to call the “godless Communists” in China. They’ve noticed no Buddhists are committing terrorism in the name of any creed.
Fear of conversion? Irrational refusal to engage? Wrong on both counts. It’s more, in some cases, of having already discovered the message of the living and teaching Jesus — The Kingdom of Heaven is within, now, for those with ears to hear what he tried to teach, instead of obsessing on how he died. Those teachings make Jesus important (and Valentinus and the Thomas Church understood this, it seems). They set one free from the need to convert to the creed of a much later institution formed in his name.
Dismissing the claims of atheists because they don’t understand theology doesn’t even rise to the level of argument. I bet you didn’t bother to learn the finer points of astrological divination before rejecting it as unworthy of belief, and very likely, have never considered in detail the beliefs of Hindus or Animists or Buddhists and yet remain unworried that you are missing out on some essential truth. It never ceases to amaze me how believers of one creed can shake their heads in disbelief over the crazy tenets of another (Scientology, for instance) without ever stepping outside of their own framework of belief to consider how astonishingly unreasonable it appears to non-believers.
I can’t say that Dawkins has no insight into religioius belief — but I can say that like many other true believers of all kind, he starts from a premise that because they are so deeply held, his beliefs are obvious, making his mode of expression unnecessarily inflammatory and probably intolerant.
The reason not to teach children about religion in public elementary school, among other good reasons, is that teachers will almost never be unbiased. Unless you want to recreate the grade school equivalent of the Thirty Years’ War, non-instruction remains the best policy.
I thnk old Chesterton gave the best defense against atheism.
FWIW, by coincidence I just finished a profile of Dawkins for PoliticsDaily:
http://www.politicsdaily.com/2009/12/09/the-evolution-richard-dawkins-the-rock-star-of-neo-atheism/
The upshot, to save you the time–I see him as an evangelist when it comes to science and evolution, which is good, and which he’s very good at. And he’s closer to a fundamentalist when it comes to religion and irreligion. His latest book, as his pre-God Delusion books, are very good on explaining evolution and biology and such, esp to non-science types like me.
Mr. Nickol,
I didn’t say that the OT God is not God, only that my atheist friends assume that the only valid conception of God is a giant man who is erratic, irrational and angry at us, despite having made us who we are. The point was to illustrate the insufficiency and literalness of their understanding, and the fact that they do not engage at all with the different picture of God put forward in the NT.
Your follow up questions were well put, and I’m sure we all wrestle with just such questions. However, my atheist friends seem not to be able to. Their visceral response to the thought of religion usually precludes the possibility, and any attempt at subtlety or interpretation is brushed away as “delusion.”
“Dismissing the claims of atheists because they don’t understand theology doesn’t even rise to the level of argument.” That’s true, I think, as far as it goes. But only as far as it goes. I don’t think a critic like Eagleton, for instance, is faulting Dawkins for his atheism. He’s faulting him for his writing an attack on Christianity without taking the trouble to understand his subject, and that’s a very different matter.
Granted, there are certainly belief systems that many of us probably dismiss out of hand — Scientoloty and astrological divination among them (though certainly not Buddhism and Hinduism). But if I were to write a book critical of Scientology or astrology, I would certainly take the trouble to study the subjects before putting pen to paper.
Or suppose I were to write a book dismissing Marxism as unworthy of study, because it is a failed system of belief (as it seems to be at the moment, at any rate, after 1989 And All That). Hence it was not worth my while in writing my book actually to read Marx or his disciples. Can you imagine any publishers worth their salt who would bring such a book out? or if by some miracle, one of them did, can you imagine any reviewers worth their salt taking such a book seriously? Yet Dawkins on Christianity is taken seriously. What’s the difference?
Or suppose I were a bit more sophisticated, and actually read my way through the Marxist classics before writing, but then judged Marxism entirely by monsters such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong (atheists to a man, it might be pointed out). Would I be taken seriously? Yet isn’t that the equivalent of judging Christianity by the likes of Oral Roberts and Tammy Lee Baker et al? Or for that matter, by the likes of Torquemada or Pope Gregory XIII, he who ordered a Te Deum sung in thanksgiving for the St. Bartholemew’s Day massacre of 1572, in which some tens of thousands of Huguenots were murdered by their Catholic countrymen?
In an ideal world, secularists would examine honestly how their system of belief could produce Stalin and Mao, etc., and Christians (particularly Catholics) would examine honestly how their systems could produce Gregory XIII, Torquemada, etc. (And Buddhists might examine honestly why Zen — in Japan at least — was the way of the warrior, but that’s another question for another time).
David N.–
Thanks for the letter fragment you quoted. I don’t recall that passage in “Come Be My Light,” the spiritual autobiography of Mother Teresa compiled by her postulator, but I have no reason to doubt the authenticity of the quoted language. Mother Teresa apparently did have doubts, yet nevertheless she unabatedly served God by serving the poorest of the poor. There’s a lesson there for all of us.
Nicholas, I don’t understand Dawkins to be attacking Christianity in particular, but belief in divine beings. I could be wrong about that, but I don’t understand him to be writing “about” Christianity (or Islam, etc.) in a primarily descriptive or interpretive sense. Some atheists (mabye including Dawkins) make arguments along the lines of not being able to believe in God because others who do believe in God are bad, and/or their theology makes no sense. I would consider that to be a pretty weak, almost vicarious type of reasoning (looking at the beliefs of others as a basis for one’s own), but if one were to make that kind of argument I would expect a certain level of analysis.
I think many atheists are angry at the notion that it is they who need to justify their belief in the non-existence of something no one has ever seen and really can’t describe. I think they should grow up and find a more mature style of argumentation, but I doubt if the nature of their arguments will ever require them to study theology.
Thank you all for the comments.
This was not intended as a post about the strengths and weaknesses of atheism, but rather about what religious “neutrality,” at home or at school, really entails.
Let me also underscore what I take to be the most important sentence in the last section I quoted from Longley’s column: “The fact that today’s perfectly good answers are the same as yesterday’s does not exclude the possibility that one day they won’t be.”
You can call this openmindedness or intellectual honesty or intellectual courage. Whatever you call it, it is not a quality exclusively associated with atheism or agnosticism (though many atheists like to call themselves “free thinkers”); and indeed there are some atheists whose attitude to religion is one of easy and unwarranted certitude (if only about what we can or cannot know).
It should go without saying, here, that easy, thoughtless certitude also characterizes much religious belief. Neither side has a lock on complacence. Both sides are tempted to ask only those questions they already know how to answer — and to dismiss any other questions as unimportant or unanswerable. Atheists who are also scientists should be especially wary of turning their provisional conclusions about religion into unshakable axioms that never need to be revisited, and I think it’s fair to say, in the case of Dawkins, that that’s exactly what they’ve become. If only his argument were just that children should not be referred to as “Christian children” or “Hindu children,” then it would be only an innocuous fatuity. (Does Dawkins think it’s dangerous nationalism to call children in England “English children”?) But he says much more than that: he says that it is wrong to “indoctrinate tiny children in the religion of their parents,” presumably on the grounds that children are not able to “cogitate profitably” about religion, as MEP memorably puts it. A religion is not just an intellectual theory, to be reserved to those whose minds are mature enough for theory; it is also a set of practices and habits that help to determine how we mature — and whether we will mature into the kind of people capable of taking a religious theory seriously enough to understand it.
Last night I saw James Wood speak at a panel discussion on “Evangelicalism and the Contemporary Intellectual.” There is nothing squishy about Woods’s atheism, but there is nothing triumphalistic about it either. He understands the appeal of religion (partly because he grew up in a Christian home); he believes that there are satisfactions associated with religious experience that no secular experience can replace — he quoted T.S. Eliot’s line, “Nothing is a substitute for anything else” — but he also believes, with Edmund Gosse, that it is wrong to treat this life as a mere antechamber. Having been a Christian himself, he has better reason that Dawkins to imagine he knows exactly what Christians think or what motivates them. Instead, he remains curious and engaged. He believes in the usefulness of doubt, but his doubts seem to perplex him rather than to comfort him. One way for a Christian to learn or maintain intellectual humility is to remember that he or she is not as intelligent as many people who don’t believe in God. Wood remembers — and last night reminded his audience — that there are extremely intelligent people, and even some “contemporary intellectuals,” who do believe. He mentioned Terry Eagleton, Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Leszek Kolakowski (and, yes, he mentioned they were all Catholic.)
I think most believers would find a simple, intuitive statement of belief, based on little if any formal study, to be charming.
I think most believers would find a simple, intuitive statement of unbelief, based on little if any formal study, to be outrageous.
If I am correct, it seems like extraordinary bias. God’s existence must be accepted as a fact unless you are able to prove otherwise, and you better be extraordinarily erudite before you make your case, or you will be scoffed at.
Also, what has faith got to do with reason and reason with faith? How can reason be “interrogated by faith”? What does that even mean?
An interesting critique of the new atheists from the left by Robert Wright, author of The Evolution of God:
“But the New Atheists’ main short-term goal wasn’t to turn believers into atheists, it was to turn atheists into New Atheists — fellow fire-breathing preachers of the anti-gospel. The point was to make it not just uncool to believe, but cool to ridicule believers.”
“Axiomatic to New Atheism is that religion is not just factually wrong, but the root of evil, which suggests that other proposed root causes of the sort typically stressed on the left aren’t really the problem. “
“All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected. At the same time, as some New Atheists have now shown, you don’t have to believe in God to exhibit intolerance and incivility.”
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/11/30/the_anti_god_squad?page=0,1&showcomments=yes
David Bentley Hart has a recent book about atheism too – Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
I don’t really understand the need some feel to denounce atheism – it seems like overcompensation to so vigorously carry the battle to the “enemy”.
It’s certainly true that some atheists resemble fundamentalists, often having been terrorized as children by fanatics. Fundamentalists on both sides tend to see themselves as victims of wrong-believers.
For whatever personal anecdotes are worth, my Bible-believing Baptist in-laws believe that the godless have deprived their children the right to prayer in public school. My equally zealous atheist mother believes that God’s bullies deprive her of her freedom from religion whenever anybody prayers over the food at a public function.
As Christmas and another season of discord and discontent between these two factions rolls around, I can testify to one thing: Fundamentalists of all stripes are tiresome, and I leave them to Christ, whose patience is infinite, and pray to St. Jerome to help me keep my mouth shut.
I also knew kindly and decent atheists in our Unitarian Church as a child who were of a wholly different sort.
These were largely men and women with advanced degrees in the sciences who believed that decency and morality contributed to a stable society and the common good. Their argument against references to God in our liturgy (such as it was) was that morality and decency ought not to be tied to what they considered something as intangible as God. Their notion was that if people required faith in an unprovable entity like God to be good, they would cease to feel the compunction to decency if they lost their faith.
They could be vehement about their views, but lacked the chip-on-the-shoulder other atheists with personal grudges against religion had.
In the early 1980s, the Unitarian-Universalists accepted God-free language, and, as a believer in at least a nebulous kind of Benevolence at that time, I turned my search for truth toward more mainstream religion, though I am still friends with many Unitarians and often find their lack of zealotry a balm at this time of year.
I also find like the extremely low-key Christmas morning Mass a gift. I like to think I’m not the only one who is there to avoid the frenzy and hysteria of the CCD teachers trying to get kids to “perform” properly for the children’s Christmas Eve Mass and the overpacked and over-scented crowd at Midnight Mass.