Author Archives: Mike Higton

Ch.2, Introduction (pp.51–52).

It is worth dwelling a little longer on the claims I made in the last post. Richard Dawkins claims that central to the meaning of the word ‘God’ are explanatory claims about the existence and arrangement of the cosmos – that God is (the content of) an explanatory hypothesis. I claim that Dawkins is in error – at least, he is in error to the extent that he takes himself to be stating something essential about Christian (Jewish, Islamic) understandings of God.

What kinds of investigations would be necessary to adjudicate between us, though?

There are historical investigations that we could undertake – from deeply speculative examination of the earliest emergence of ideas about God or the gods, through discussions of the development of the idea of creation in pre-Christian Judaism and its borrowings from other cultures, on into the debates about creation that took place between gnostic and catholic forms of Christianity in the early centuries after Christ, and the interactions with neo-Platonism and other strands of thought, and on into the more philosophical discussion of creation in medieval Judaism, Islam and Christianity, and then the transformations of the doctrine that began to take place with late medieval nominalism/voluntarism, and accelerated in the early modern period… and so on. I only really know this story from the time of Christ onwards, but for that section of it there are some good resources out there: Gerhard May’s Creatio ex Nihilo, David Burrell’s Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions and Faith and Freedom, Michael Buckley’s At the Origins of Modern Atheism, and Kathryn Tanner’s God and Creation in Christian Theology, for instance. My claim – one which you can follow up using these and other resources – is that God-as-explanatory-hypothesis is a late and ambiguous arrival on the scene, rather than the obvious core of religious beliefs about God.

There are, however, other kinds of investigation that we could undertake. We could call in the sociologists of religion, and ask them to tell us the results of opinion surveys of religious believers. I suspect that we would find that there is a good deal of ‘God as explanatory hypothesis’ stuff out there now, because that kind of claim, and forms of apologetic argument supposed to back it up, have become very popular in recent decades. It is by no means universal, of course, and may not even be quite the overwhelming majority position that some of Dawkins’ remarks might suggest, but it will certainly be there in strength.

However, I think we can dig deeper than that. My claim is that, although that kind of argument has become popular as a defensive mechanism, it’s prevalence does not actually tell you a great deal about what ‘God’ actually means in contemporary Christianity. One can, I claim, imagine (as a thought experiment) Christianity stripped of that particular apologetic reflex, and one does not need to make many other changes to one’s picture of Christianity in order to do so. Most of the ways in which most Christians talk, think and practice in relation to what they call ‘God’ have, I claim, little to do with ‘explanation’ – certainly little to do with the kinds of explanation that Dawkins is talking about. In order to pursue that argument further, however, we would need to ask questions about how Christian belief works – about how Christian ideas hang together, about how they are embedded in different forms of Christian life, about what their presuppositions and implications are, about how they draw upon and relate to scriptural and traditional sources, about what forms of testing, questioning, and change they are open to, and so on. In other words – we might need to talk to some theologians.

When I say that Dawkins’ misrepresents Christian belief, I do not mean that he is missing nuances, or that his view is too harsh, or insensitive, or that it lacks proper respect. I mean something much more central than that. Dawkins’ description of the God hypothesis should itself be treated as a hypothesis – the hypothesis that it is appropriate to describe God as an explanatory hypothesis. And Dawkins’ implicit hypothesis should be tested appropriately. There are relevant bodies of evidence, argument and expertise that can be drawn on in order to test Dawkins’ implicit hypothesis – most of which you can find in a good theology department.

I contend that Dawkins’ implicit hypothesis fails, and that this failure undermines the saliency of his overall argument. And I also claim that one of the big problems with Dawkins’ book is that he appears not to realise that there is an argument to be had here, and appears to be ignorant of the resources that might be brought to bear on resolving that argument. And, lastly, I claim that the misrepresentation of the nature of belief in God that Dawkins promotes here is closely related to the misrepresentation promoted by creationists, and that in this limited but important respect Dawkins is their ally.

Ch.2, Introduction (pp.51–52).

Here is Dawkins’ statement of the God Hypothesis:

there exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.

In other words, Dawkins thinks ‘God’ names an explanatory hypothesis for the existence and nature of the universe. That is, for him, the core of what ‘God’ means, so that to dispense with this hypothesis for explanatory purposes is to dispense with God.

If you’ve been holding your breath, wondering whether Christian claims about God are going to receive a devastating blow from Dawkins’ arguments, this is the point where you can breathe again, deeply and slowly. This is the point where it turns out that Dawkins is not talking about what we mean by ‘God’ at all. Speaking for Christian theology (but this would be true for Judaism and Islam as well), God is not an explanatory hypothesis.

Let me say it again:
GOD IS NOT AN EXPLANATORY HYPOTHESIS.
That’s not what the word ‘God’ means, it’s not the taproot of belief in God. This is a sideshow.

Let me be more precise. We know when the idea that ‘God’ named an explanatory hypothesis really took hold: it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And it’s not hard to show that this particular idea about what is meant by God is (a) a drastic thinning and reshaping of what had traditionally been meant, in the great monotheistic traditions, and (b) a misrepresentation of the God actually believed in even by those Christians who lived after this shift. (That is, while it might have become a popular apologetic argument, and have assumed centrality in some explicit modern Christian accounts of what ‘God’ means, it has never been a particularly good way of getting at the God implied by actual Christian practice.) Christians can stand shoulder to shoulder with Laplace, and say ‘I have no need of that hypothesis!’ – and in doing so they will be standing up for core, orthodox, mainstream Christian belief in God, not some mealy-mouthed invention of a handful of sophisticates in headlong retreat from the battalions of science.

Let me say it again: God is not an explanatory hypothesis. Dawkins’ version of the God Hypothesis may be a hypothesis but it certainly isn’t about God. Dawkins is firing at …

… well, what is Dawkins firing at? Dawkins has, in effect, taken some form of creationism as paradigmatic for all belief in God. Creationism may be nuts, from Dawkins point of view, but it seems to be the movement that (at last) clearly, firmly and honestly defines ‘God’ properly.

No. No, no, no, no, no.

Creationism is an irrelevant sideshow. It doesn’t get you anywhere near the heart of what the great religious traditions have meant by ‘God’. It doesn’t even get you anywhere near the heart of what creationists, once they are off their apologetic soapboxes, mean by ‘God’. Dawkins (bizarrely enough) accords it far too much power and significance. Let me say it one more time: God is not an explanatory hypothesis.

There are other problems with Dawkins’ God hypothesis as well. It appears to assume that the word ‘God’ names one more thing that there is in the total list of things there are: you count all the things in the universe, and then there is one more: God. And it appears to assume that there is no problem, on the side of the defenders of this hypothesis, in defining this extra thing literally and quite straightforwardly as a designing, creative intelligence. (These assumptions have to be embedded in Dawkins’ version of the God Hypothesis, I think, for his alternative hypothesis to make any sense: that is, his claim that a designing, creative intelligence such as is postulated by the God hypothesis can in fact only emerge as the product of a long process of evolution.) Trouble is, you don’t have to look very hard to find theologians (Jewish, Christian or Islamic) who will tell you that the falsehood of both these assumptions is a core part of what the word ‘God’ means.

Ch.2, Introduction (pp.51–52).

The argument begins properly in Chapter 2, ‘The God Hypothesis’. Dawkins’ opening riff is to describe the God of the Old Testament / Hebrew Bible, to describe the horrified reactions of decent men to that depiction of God, and then to explain that his argument does not rely on this particular example:

The God Hypothesis should not stand or fall with its most unlovely instantiation, Yahweh…. I am not attacking the particular qualities of Yahweh…or any other specific God….’

We’ll come in the next post to what he is attacking, and the real fun will begin. For now, though, and despite Dawkins’ protest that it is not germaine to his argument, I want to pause with his depiction of Yahweh.

The first level of response would of course be to say, ‘Oh, but what about all the other things that the Hebrew Bible says about God!’ and to chase Dawkins argument on its own territory. There’s a lot that could be said along those lines, but I’ll leave that argument to others. After all, Dawkins clearly does have a point: there’s plenty of unpalatable material to be found in the Hebrew Bible.

I find a second level of response more interesting. It is the response that effectively says, ‘Yes. So what?’ Dawkins’ argument works, it seems to me, if we assume that there is some significant body of religious people for whom ‘God’ means ‘the being whose description can be derived simply by reading the Hebrew Bible through’, or ‘the being whose character description is provided by the Hebrew Bible read as a continuous (picaresque?) novel’. (‘the most unpleasant character in all fiction’, Dawkins says).

Now, some Christians and Jews may say that this is what ‘God’ means, and may say that their understanding of God is derived and supported in this way. It is not true for them, and it is not true for anyone else, nor has it ever been: the role of the Bible in religious identification and description of God is much more complex, and much more interesting.

To put it in Dawkinsian terminology, if Christianity and Judaism are versions of the God Hypothesis, and if one did (unlike Dawkins at this point) want to test those particular versions of the Hypothesis, you wouldn’t discover what those versions of the Hypothesis claimed by sitting down like Randolph Churchill or Thomas Jefferson for a neutral read through and assessment of the whole Old Testament.

(This is one place, by the way, where we see the complex relation between the descriptions of theologians and the practice of ordinary believers. Ordinary believers may – do – claim that something like the ‘neutral read through’ approach is appropriate, and would indeed yield the Christian or Jewish depiction of God. Many ‘sophisticated’ theologians would not. But this is not simply a case of a majority believing one thing and a minority believing another: many such theologians would claim to be providing a description of what ordinary believers do in fact do, and of the traditions of reading to which they are unconscious heirs. Remember what I have said before: ‘What the theologian-botanist thinks he has in his jars…is not God, but what Christians say and believe about God. )

Ch.1: ‘A Deeply Religious Non-believer’ (pp.41–50).

Dawkins’ first chapter is not where the meat of his argument lies. He uses it for two tasks: an initial clarification of his object, and an initial clarification of his approach. His object will be ‘supernaturalist’ rather than purely metaphorical Einsteinian religion, and his approach will be to peel back the layer of obfuscating ‘respect’ which so often protects religions from serious questioning.

Each part of the chapter rests upon a central distinction: the first on the supernaturalist/Einsteinian distinction, the second on the undue-respect-for-religion/ordinary-human-respect distinction.

My verdict on the chapter, based on all the little bits of analysis and questioning that I’ve undertaken, is that neither distinction quite flies. That is, neither distinction aids us in thinking seriously about religion, or about God, or about our world. Each looks superficially plausible, but that plausibility runs no deeper than the skin. Time and time again, Dawkins examples don’t seem to work in the way that he thinks they work; time and time again his conclusions turn out to be facile. This chapter is an example of bad thinking – bad thinking about God, and bad thinking about religion.

Ch.1, §2: ‘Undeserved Respect’ (pp.41–50).

Richard Dawkins closes the second chapter, on pp.46-50, with a description and analysis of the Danish ‘Muhammad cartoons’ controversy. The primary point of his description is to supposed to be to ‘illuminate our society’s exaggerated respect for religion, over and above ordinary human respect’. The point, though, comes not in the description itself (though that serves Dawkins’ wider purposes in other ways), but in what he goes on to say.

He describes an interview between the journalist Andrew Mueller and Iqbal Sacranie. The latter described the importance that Muhammad has for Muslims. The former responded that Muslim’s respect for the Prophet cannot be imposed on other people: ‘nobody else is obliged to take it seriously’ (p.49). Dawkins notes that it is the threat of violence that forces people to show ‘respect’ – i.e., to keep quiet out of fear.

And the punchline comes when he turns back to ‘decent liberal newspapers’ and notes that whilst deploring the violence, they expressed ‘sympathy for the deep “offence” and “hurt” that Muslims had “suffered”.’ Dawkins thinks this is evidence of the bizarre extra respect for religion shown by our society – hence the point of telling the story at this point.

That’s a strange idea, though, isn’t it? ‘Ordinary human respect’ (to use Dawkins’ expression) presumably allows me to take into account the fact that people have beliefs and emotional attachments, and acknowledge that any offence or upset they feel at my words and actions will be relative to those beliefs and emotional attachments. And if their beliefs and attachments are such that they will experience as a personal attack those of my words an actions that criticise or ridicule something that they are deeply attached to – well, ordinary human respect suggests that I should take that into account. So, if I find that some of my Muslim friends, though abhorring the violent reaction of some other Muslims, nevertheless did find the cartoons upsetting, ordinary human respect suggests that I respond to them in a way which takes that into account. That does not mean that I share the beliefs and emotional attachments that underlie that upset; it doesn’t mean that they expect me to share them. But it does mean that, if we end up discussing the incident, and particularly if I find myself attacking some of the responses of some Muslims to this incident, and even more so if I want to argue for the right of people to indulge their free speech like this, ordinary human tact suggests that I should recognise and perhaps explicitly acknowledge their upset. That’s not about some special kind of respect for religion; it’s about treating my interlocutors as human.

As for the violence of the response – well, Dawkins doesn’t really offer an analysis. But he does insinuate one. His language creates the impression of a monolithic Islamic ‘world’, based in Islamic countries, but with outposts in the West. Indignation was nurtured ‘throughout the Islamic world’, ‘the whole Islamic world’; he quotes Germaine Greer to the effect that ‘what these people do best is pandemonium’. He quotes Richard Mueller referring to ‘any of you clowns’, presumably meaning Muslims, and arguing that, possibly, ‘Islam and the west are fundamentally irreconcilable’. And he finishes his initial description with the sarcastic comment, ‘Fortunately, our political leaders were on hand to remind us that Islam is a religion of peace and mercy.’ This is, for him, about Islam pure and simple. There is no historical or political contextualisation, no differentiation. There is no attempt to ask why some forms of Islam in some contexts are in such a state that this kind of response is all too depressingly predictable. There is no sense that there might be any kind of explanation to give, other than it is the fault of ‘Islam’ – as if this would have happened wherever and whenever the cartoons had been published.

As with so much of the rest of this chapter, I simply find that Dawkins’ analysis simply gets us nowhere. He doesn’t offer me concepts with which I can understand what is going on. And when he does offer concepts or distinctions (like the religious respect v. ordinary human respect distinction), I find that far from getting to the heart of the matter, they blunt themselves making superficial grooves on the skin of things. His is not an account that helps me think.

Ch.1, §2: ‘Undeserved Respect’ (pp.41–50).

Dawkins mentions a U.S. legal case, in which a 12-year-old boy’s parents sued his school for refused to allow him to wear a T-shirt bearing the words ‘Homosexuality is a sin, Islam is a lie, abortion is murder. Some issues are just black and white!’ (p.45). They won their case on the grounds that the T-shirt ban infringed their constitutional right to freedom of religion.

Dawkins comments:

[I]f such people took their stand on the right to free speech, one might reluctantly sympathize. But that isn’t what it is about. ‘The right to poke your nose into other people’s private lives.’ The legal case in favour of discrimination against homosexuals is being mounted as a counter-suit against religious discrimination! … You can’t get away with saying, ‘If you try to stop me from insulting homosexuals it violates my freedom of prejudice.’ But you can get away with saying, ‘It violates my freedom of religion.’ What, when you think about it, is the difference? (p.46)

That’s an interesting question. Can we distinguish a right to free speech (i.e., in part a right to form, hold and express opinions, to develop and express ideas), from a right to practice religion (i.e., in part a right to form and maintain a certain kind of polity – a certain kind of community)?

There are difficult questions here for a liberal society. On the freedom of speech side, the ‘right to poke your nose into other people’s private lives’ might be a combination of a right to form opinions about the morality of differing sexual behaviours, the right to express those opinions publicly, the right to campaign for the wider public acceptance of those opinions, the right to campaign for the political adoption and enforcement of those opinions, and even the right not to believe in the same public/private split that Dawkins refers to. All that might be something that a liberal society might (reluctantly, as Dawkins says) allow on the grounds of freedom of speech – though it will need to balance that with vigilance against (at least) incitement to violence, and there will be all sorts of interesting situations where this right might need to be curtailed.

But what about the right to form a community, a polity, that embodies those opinions? Is there a right for, say, conservative Christians who agree together that homosexuality is a sin to band together not simply as a collection of people exercising their common right to free speech, but as a community that shapes its common life accordingly? A community where that message is taught, where the claim that homosexuality is a sin is embodied in practices of confession and absolution, where children are brought up in that belief, and so on? What then?

I do not at all think it easy to answer these questions. That is, I think it fairly important that we should uphold some such right (however reluctantly, in particular cases); I also think that just as the right to freedom of speech is appropriately modified by a ban on incitement to violence, so there will appropriately be all sorts of caveats surrounding any right to form and participate in identity-forming polities.

Nevertheless, I think that such a right is not quite reducible to freedom of speech, nor even freedom of speech plus freedom of association. ‘Freedom of religion’ has to do with the right to participate in identity-forming polities – to become defined as a member of such a polity, and to go freely through the wider world identified as a member of such a polity.

Having said that, however, I can’t quite see how such a right extends to allowing the wearing of offensive T-shirts in school.

Footnote:
The only information I can find on the T-shirt case suggests that it was in the end fought on freedom of speech grounds. See here and here (some way down the page).

Ch.1, §1: ‘Deserved Respect’ (pp.31–41) – a brief addition.

A quick clarification.

In a post some time ago, I said that theology was very likely to claim that there was some ‘purpose or goal, some kind of teleology to the world’ but that ‘it does not have to do so in such a way as to get into a direct argument with scientific explanation.’

All that I meant was that it would be perfectly coherent for a theologian to claim both that the world and its development could be wholly and accurately described in terms of efficient causality, with no gaps left in the explanation that might require recourse to some other kind of explanation – and that the same theologican could claim that this explicable world nevertheless also can be read as travelling towards some goal. And it would be possible for that theologian to speak of that goal as the goal for which the world was created, without that claim in any way undercutting or interfering with the comprehensiveness and completeness of the description of the world in terms of efficient causality. Of course, there are all sorts of questions about whether a theologian could have good grounds for making this sort of claim – I don’t deny that. Nevertheless, I don’t see anything logically preventing the theologian from making it should he or she believe that there are such grounds. I am also not claiming that this is exactly what theologians will or should want to say – I was simply setting it out as a possibility.

Ch.1, §2: ‘Undeserved Respect’ (pp.41–50).

Dawkins quotes a passage he wrote some time ago, when he was incensed at ‘the “sympathy” for Muslim “hurt” and “offence” expressed by Christian leaders and even some secular opinion formers.’ He drew this parallel:

If the advocates of apardheid had their wits about them they would claim – for all I know truthfully – that allowing mixed races is against their religion. A good part of the opposition would respectfully tiptoe away. And it is no use claiming that this is an unfair parallel because apartheid has no rational justification. The whole point of religious faith, its strength and chief glory, is that it does not depend on rational justifcation. The rest of us are expected to defend out prejudices. But ask a religious person to justify their faith and you infringe ‘religious liberty’.

Some problems with this:

• Apardheid was given a religious justification.
• That did not make many of its critics tiptoe away.
• The giving of that religious justification provided grounds on which Apartheid could be argued against.
• Those religious arguments were one reason why Apartheid lost legitimacy in South Africa.
• It is simply nonsense to say that the ‘whole point’ of religious faith is that it does not depend on rational justification. (Someone obviously forgot, for instance, to tell the Roman Catholic church – which would certainly officially reject this description.)
• I’ve yet to meet a religious person who regarded it as an infringement of their religious liberty if you asked them to justify their faith. Dawkins is roughing up straw men.

There are two things mixed up together, here. One is the question of ‘offence’ – and the great difficulty which we seem to have in distinguishing between ‘understanding’ and ‘condoning’. I do think it is important to understand the offence caused to Muslim’s by the Rusdie affair, and the reasons why it got stoked to such an amazing ferocity. That is not the same as ‘condoning’, though it might do a great deal to affect what I think appropriate remedies are. Commentators, and their readers, seem all too frequently to be unable to keep this distinction clear.

The second point, though, is the ‘rational justification’ point. And there’s an important distinction here, as well: between foundationalist and non-foundationalist argumentative strategies. Faced with a religious person expressing offence at some event, the foundationalist will say, ‘Can you justify that attitude of yours, starting from axioms that are unquestionable, or shared by all people of common sense and good will?’ The nonfoundationalist will say, ‘What premises do you start from when you justify that attitude of yours? And how do you argue from those premises to that attitude?’ Whatever one thinks of the viability of foundationalist strategies, the nonfoundationalist strategy is always open.

One thing you can be sure of. If you are asking a religious person about their justification for some attitude, idea, or practice x, you can bet that there is a long history of argument about the necessity or propriety of x within that tradition. And even if you do not share the premises from which people who are members of that tradition argue, you can be sure that the very fact that this x is presented as religious means that you will be able to find purchase within that tradition of argument for questioning it, perhaps challenging it and arguing against it. So, if apartheid is presented by someone as ‘Christian’, that means it is being presented as justified on some biblical or theological grounds – and that very fact opens up a whole realm of argumentative strategies that can be brought to bear against it.

Far from removing the prejudice from the realm of argument, the naming of some attitude or practice or idea as ‘religious’ brings it into a realm of argument.