Category Archives: The God Delusion

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

Dawkins provides other examples of ‘our society’s overweening respect for religion’:

• The pusillanimous reluctance to call the Protestant and Catholic factions in Northern Ireland by their religious names, preferring euphemisms like ‘Loyalist’ and ‘Nationalist; and
• the description of the Sunni/Shia conflict in Iraq as an ‘ethnic conflict’, when it is ‘Clearly a religious conflict’ (p.43).

Well, in the Northern Ireland case, some of the reasons would be:

• a desire not to misrepresent those Catholics who are not Nationalist and those Protestants who are not Loyalists – really quite sizable numbers;
• a desire to name directly the political aims for which the two sides were struggling, rather than using religious names as proxies; and
• a desire not to give a religious aura to the pretensions of either side (perhaps so as to avoid the ‘undeserved respect’ that such a religious aura would promote!)

Seems pretty reasonable to me.

There is a broader point, though – one that I rather suspect we will be coming back to. And that is Dawkins’ confident belief that the conflicts he mentions are ‘religious conflicts’, and that this means something fundamentally different from calling them ‘ethnic’ or ‘community’ conflicts.

Now, there are two routes that we could take, here, but each is going to make it difficult to make sense of Dawkins’ comments. On the one hand, we could define religion as a set of interconnected institutions, practices, and stories that embody and express the basic organizing categories for the culture of a particular group, and connect that culture to some sense of the way things most deeply are. So to talk about religion is to talk about the way of life of a community or a people, and the ways in which that people come to see their way of life as natural, proper, or legitimate. To speak about ‘religious conflict’ in these contexts is precisely to speak about community or ethnic conflicts: a clash between ways of life, between ways of seeing the world, between pervasive ways of organising human life.

Heading in that direction, however, does not seem to me to capture the specificity of Dawkins insistence on calling his examples religious rather than communal or ethnic – his belief that the latter forms of words hide the real nature, the real roots, of the conflicts in question. Yet if we go down the root of focusing on religious belief of the kind that Dawkins’ book attacks – belief in God, belief in the supernatural – it becomes far less clear that it is appropriate to describe these conflicts as in some sense inherently religious. That is, it is far from obvious that the roots, progress, ferocity, and outcomes of these conflicts connect specifically to the beliefs in and about God of the protagonists.

As I say, I suspect we’ll be coming back to this, so I assume Dawkins’ will eventually present some arguments about the religious nature of these or similar conflicts – and my guess (I haven’t reached the relevant chapters, yet) is that we’ll end up arguing about the function of religious beliefs and practices in strengthening or exacerbating the sense of identity, of legitimacy, of entitlement of the groups involved in conflicts. For now, however, all I can do is register my sense that the argumentative moves that Dawkins is making at this point don’t quite possess the breezy and transparent common sense that his rhetoric suggests.

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

Dawkins provides a set of examples of “society’s overweening respect for religion”. The first has to do with pacifism:

By far the easiest grounds for gaining conscientious objector status in wartime are religious. You can be a brilliant moral philosopher with a prize-winning doctoral thesis expounding the evils of war, and still be given a hard time by a draft board evaluating your claim to be a conscientious objector. Yet if you say that one or both of your parents is a Quaker you sail through like a breeze, no matter how inarticulate and illiterate you may be on the theory of pacifism or, indeed, Quakerism itself.

I do not for a moment want to defend the actions of the draft board; the treatment of conscientious objectors of all stripes has often been pretty appalling. I’m interested, however, in the difference between the moral philosopher and the Quaker (or child of Quakers). The former, clearly, has a well thought through personal conviction that has been subjected to various forms of intellectual scrutiny and has emerged as that person’s own, settled, relatively independent position on the matter. Simply as shorthand, let’s say this is a matter of an individual’s (settled, tested, adamant) ideas. That is (to me) clearly something that a draft board should take into account, and ‘respect’ – though I can imagine them somewhat naively thinking that if someone’s views were justified by a set of of public arguments, there was a chance that they might change that person’s mind by entering into the arguments. It is easy to see how ‘rational’ might be read as ‘tractable’ in this context.

What of the other person, though? His or her pacifism is a matter of the way he or she was brought up, the mores of his or her ‘people’, his or her ‘community’ (to use a word that Dawkins is about to grimace at). Simply as another bit of shorthand, let’s say that this is less a matter of of an individual ideas, and more a matter of (communal, inherited, nurtured) identity. And it is easy to understand a draft board thinking that there was not a lot of point in arguing with such a person: argument is, after all, unlikely to change someone’s parentage. They were faced with a fait accompli.

Now, I have no idea whether or not draft boards faced with Quakers or the children of Quakers refused even to ask some basic questions. I don’t know whether they looked for evidence that the person they had in front of them really was defined by his membership of Quaker communities in the way I’ve suggested.

I’m not sure, however, whether that is Dawkins’ problem (i.e., that the aura of ‘respect’ due to religion prevented even some common sense questioning) , or whether his problem is a deeper one. I wonder whether his problem is that what I am calling ‘identity’ should have been accepted as a good reason for conscientious objector status in the first place, amongst those who did not or could not back it up with individual ideas. That is, I’m not sure whether Dawkins objects (as I do not) simply to the fact that ‘identity’ was accorded substantial moral weight.

There are deep waters here, and I’m unwilling to launch into them when I’m not quite sure of the nature of Dawkins’ positions. Suffice it to say that passage is making me think about fundamental differences in anthroplogy (i.e., in answers to the question, ‘What is a human being?’) and in moral vision (i.e., in answers to the question, ‘What is moral weight anyway, and what should be accorded it?).

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

Dawkins quotes the late, great Douglas Adams:

Religion … has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. What it means is, “Here is an idea or a notion that you’re not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ If somebody votes for a party that you don’t agree with, you’re free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it […] But on the other hand if somebody says ‘I mustn’t move a light switch on a Saturday’, you say, ‘I respect that’.

The idea that nobody gets aggrieved by political discussion is interesting, but not as interesting as the example Adams gives. He is, I presume, referring to Jewish laws about the Sabbath. And it is an unfortunate example for Adams to pick, because if there is one thing that has characterised the Jewish legal tradition, it is argument. Sabbath regulations are, in that tradition, pervasively and constantly argued over. Yes, that tradition speaks of the law as holy, or as sacred, but that absolutely has not meant an absence of discussion.

There is more here, though, than an unfortunate choice of example. Turning back to the Christian tradition, I find it hard to think of anything that has not been discussed at great length, with real differences of opinion, within that tradition. As Alasdair MacIntyre aptly said, a living tradition ‘is an historically extended, socially embodied argument’.

Nevertheless, there is something to Adams’ statement, because he is not talking about argument within a tradition, but argument between those who inhabit a tradition and those who stand outside it. And such argument is fraught with problems.

(1) In the first place, argument between different intellectual traditions too often takes place on a ‘darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night’. Differences in background assumption, in styles of argument, and in acceptable warrant, all too often mean that what sounds on one side like a plausible argument sounds on the other like ignorant shouting. So, someone might approach the orthodox Jewish upholder of the Sabbath and say, ‘Surely it’s ridiculous to believe that a benevolent God like the one you claim to believe in wants you to sit in darkness on the Sabbath, or that it is somehow unholy to use electricity. In any case, electricity wasn’t even invented when the law was written!’ The Jewish respondent might well find themselves at a loss to know how to answer, not because the criticism was so damning, but because it engaged so little with Jewish understanding of, and reasons for, sabbath observance.

I don’t mean to suggest a strong version of incommensurability, and say that conversation between traditions is impossible. However, a prerequisite for meaningful conversation is an effort at understanding. You can only produce interesting criticisms of Jewish sabbath observance if you understand what that observance means in the context of Jewish life. You will need to understand something of the stories that Jews tell about themselves, about God, about the law, about the Sabbath; you will need to understand something of the way in which law-observance actually functions in Jewish life. It’s not that you need to be ‘sensitive’ in some fluffy ‘please tread softly when walking on my dreams’ kind of way, but you need to understand what you are talking about in order to make sense, in order to land your punches on a real rather than an imaginary target, in order not to talk nonsense.

And if one does look for this kind of understanding one will, as I said last time, discover that one is not simply discussing the appropriate way of treating light switches on a Saturday, but is talking about the way of life of a people, that people’s history, their sense of identity. And whilst that certainly does not mean that one cannot argue about it, it does mean that one should handle the debate with appropriate sensitivity if one actually wants to have a real conversation. And ‘respect’ might be one name for that sensitivity, I suppose.

(2) In the second place, there is the fact that many of the religious people with whom one might wish to have this argument will not thought through for themselves the meaning of and reasons for the religious practice or belief that you wish to criticise. So, to keep up with the Jewish example, you may well find yourself talking to an observant Jew who behaves this way on the sabbath because she has been brought up this way, because it is what her people do, because it is part of being a member of this culture. She may rely on the fact that there are others in the community who have thought it through, who are the ones who engage in argument about it.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – until one reaches a situation where the connection between this ordinary believer and the members of the community who do engage in serious argument becomes attenuated, or breaks altogether. Confidence in the ability of the community as a whole to respond to criticisms that one cannot meet as an individual gives way to anxiety about one’s own ability to respond – and the anxious individual believer may well end up playing the ‘private’ card (that’s my personal faith, who are you to criticise it) or the ‘sacred’ card (how dare you treat these things as matters that can be argued about!). Adams is right, that does indeed happen – but it is arguably more a breakdown within religion than a necessary facet of religion.

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

Having in the first section of the chapter established that his target is supernatural religion, Dawkins’ second section explains that he does not believe that the religious views he will be examining should be handled with kid gloves: they can and should be examined and criticised as thoroughly and with as hard a head as one would use to examine any other kind of claim. He denies that

religious faith … should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.

I’m broadly in agreement, here. Paradoxically, I think that the kid-glove approach to religion is actually part of its marginalisation in modernity. Religion has largely been relegated from the sphere of public argument to an inviolable private sphere, and even when it reemerges into public still smells of the sanctuary of the private.

However, I do have three comments.

The first is simply that ordinary human respect suggests to me that I should tread more carefully when criticising ideas that are more closely bound up with some person or community’s sense of identity than I should when criticising things that are, for them, peripheral. That isn’t to say that I shouldn’t criticise those ideas, if there is pressing reason to do so – if, for instance, I think those ideas are doing harm. But it would be sensible to recognise that in discussing these ideas I can’t avoid discussing the people who hold them.

The second is that this is going to be even more sensitive when I am discussing ideas central to the identity of some group that perceives itself to be marginalised, under threat, attacked on all sides. There will be no way that what I say about the ideas will not also be taken to be a comment on the group’s right to exist as a distinctive group with a particular cultural identity and heritage. So if, say, I discuss the nature of Islam in Britain today, I will tread particularly carefully – not because there is some mystic curtain of ‘respect’ that I dare not penetrate, but because I hope I’m not stupid enough to think that my words are uttered in a vacuum. Incidentally, I’m not saying that I’ll keep quiet because of some perceived threat of violent reaction. I’m saying that my words about ideas cannot avoid being political words: they cannot avoid being commentary on the contested rights, relationships, and identities of groups in my society – and I should therefore make sure that I tread as carefully as I would if I were making direct political statements.

The third is that our society has developed contexts, procedures and ‘etiquette’ for handling some forms of political disagreement. We know, on the whole, what can and cannot be said; we have arenas for conversation and argument. That we have such things is by no means automatic: it has taken time (and trouble) to evolve. For various reasons (the privatisation of religion is one of them) we have not evolved similar contexts for discussion of religious ideas. Dawkins is right to identify this as a problem, and like him, I do not want religion to hide behind an impenetrable wall that makes discussion impossible. Neverthereless, when we do debate religion in public, and when we do realise that what we are saying cannot avoid being political contentious in a broad sense, we will also have to recognise that building a context in which all this can be discussed productively is going to take a long time, and a lot of patient labour.

So, where have we got too so far?

The key element of this first section is Dawkins distinction between supernaturalist and Einsteinian religion, or between theism and atheism. My interim finding – a proposal to be tested by the rest of the book – is that this is a piece of bad thinking. I don’t mean simply that it is a bit heavy-handed, that his presentation of it involves the misrepresentation of details, flattences nuances, tramples over fine distinctions. I mean something stronger than that.

This distinction is presented in this section (and in what I have read so far of what follows) as a basic framework, a grid for organising Dawkins arguments. It is not so much something that he argues for, as the setting out of the terms in which he will make his arguments. It is, one might say, the conceptuality he offers for making sense of religion, and he seems to think that it offers a pretty obvious, common-sense framework. However, such frameworks are worthwhile precisely to the extent that they enable perceptive judgment. They are worthwhile to the extent that they go beyond superficial initial plausibility, beyond ‘common sense’, and enable intellectual work to be done, making possible good description, good explanation, further distinctions. They are worthwhile to the extent that they promote the labour of understanding. (And, yes, my echoes of some descriptions of scientific method – vageuly Kuhnian – are deliberate.) And my argument is that Dawkins’ basic framework, which organises a good deal of what he has to say, is not worthwhile. It is a piece of bad thinking.

The minor side of this is what I believe to be Dawkins’ misinterpretation of Einstein. I have done a small amount of digging (not a great deal, so I still don’t want to put too much weight on this side), and what I have found so far seems to confirm my suspicion that Dawkins has not quite got Einstein right. I have perhaps made too much of this, and I don’t mention it again in order to score points (as it were, on the level of pointing out a grammatical mistake or an incorrect date). I mention it again because I think it illustrates the point I am trying to make. I think that the basic distinction that structures Dawkins’ ways of thinking prevents him from understanding Einstein. This is one of the examples which shows Dawkins’ distinction to be bad thinking. The way he thinks this whole thing called religion works means that he is bound to see Einstein as on his side rather than on the supernaturalist side, and so he is bound to think that anything in Einstein’s comments that doesn’t sound like vanilla naturalism must be purely metaphorical and poetic, a fluffy coating for an insight that is best expressed quite otherwise. His key distinction has deadened his thought.

I may be wrong about Einstein (though I must admit that I would like to see what Dawkins would make of Spinoza, if he looked more closely). I feel myself on firmer ground when I leap to the other side of Dawkins divide. I take it that the worth of Dawkins distinction will show itself – will consist in – the ‘success’ of descriptions of religion that take this opposition as central or basic (where ‘success’ means succes at organising detail, at putting together multiple examples that would otherwise seem disparate, at uncovering deep patterns of thought and behaviour that would otherwise remain hard to name). And that is simply not the case. My strategy in most of my posts so far has been to point to the fact that conversations between positions that straddle Dawkins great divide are possible within a recognisably religious/theological tradition – within a mainstream monotheistic, Judeo-Christian and Islamic tradition. Or rather, I have hazarded a description of forms of religious thinking that seem to me to fall more on the Dawkinsian than the supernaturalist side of his great divide, without denying for a moment that those forms are theologically debatable, and stand in some tension with other, less Dawkinsian forms of religious thinking – but have offered those descriptions precisely in order to suggest that this tension, this debate, is one that is perfectly legitimate and intelligible within monotheistic religion. If I am right about that, it calls into question the success of Dawkins’ central distinction at capturing what is going on in monothesitic religion. It suggests, again, that his distinction, far from allowing him to make good sense of what he sees, blinds him to it: it is a piece of bad thinking.

(I have, by the way, a couple of subsidiary theses that I want to test against the rest of the book. One of them I have sketched already: I think that the initial plausibility of Dawkins distinction is in part due to a deeper rift in Western culture, a dissocation of sensibility, between (to put it crudely) head and heart. That is a much deeper, older, and more various split than the split between atheism and theism or between science and religion – and it has been as much a split within religion as a split between religion and something else. The other subsidiary thesis is that Dawkins more-or-less identifies theistic religion and creationism – or at least takes creationism as the defining case of religion. If that is the case (and I am merely suggesting it here) then Dawkins is taking as his central example of religion a fundamentally modern phenomenon that represents a drastic thinning and distorting of religious thought and language. But that’s an argument for another time.)

There is another interim verdict to set out at this point, however. It seems to me that for Dawkins religion has fundamentally to do with assent to various propositions. Religions are collections of people who hold certain ideas, who cleave to certain truths. This will come up more explicitly later on, and at the moment is no more than an attempt to specify a rather vague sense of the way his language, his use of examples, and his arguments tend. All of it makes more sense if you assume that being a member of a theistic religion of some kind is more like being convinced of the truth or applicability of a theory than it is like, say, being a member of a culture or the citizen of a country. As I say, we’re going to be coming back to this, but I’ll set out my stall now: I think this is another bit of bad thinking. I think that, if you make an assumption like that as a basic part of the intellectual machinery with which you approach religion, you won’t be able to make much sense of it. And I don’t simply mean that there will be lots of things that don’t make sense to you, but that there will be lots of times when you can’t see what sense religious behaviours or forms of language make to the practitioners. It will leave you with no account to give of why religious people do what they do, of what they take themselves to be doing – it will simply leave you, perhaps, with sneers about the weakness or dishonesty of the religious mind: comments that because they can explain anything actually explain nothing.

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

To add weight to his distinction between Einsteinian ‘religion’ and supernatural religion (religion proper), Dawkins again quotes Carl Sagan:

if by ‘God’ one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying … it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

I’ve been arguing that Dawkins’ Einsteinian / supernatural distinction is an unhelpful one, that leads to him misunderstanding material that he finds on both sides: he does not, I think, understand Einstein, and he does not understand some fairly mainstream bits of monotheistic theology, which simply do not fit his descriptions well. Sagan’s comment about prayer gives me exactly the same reaction.

I immediately thought of Simone Weil (and not just because she wrote about Gravity and Grace…), and her discussion of prayer as attention. And from there it is a short leap to contemplative prayer in general, arguably the dominant meaning of prayer in the history of the Christian tradition, and one which has little to do with the answerability of the way things are to prayer, and much more to do with the answerability of the one praying to the way things are.

In the Spinozan-Einsteinian cosmos (and even, to a much more limited extent, in the thinned-out Dawkins–Sagan version) something recognisably akin to prayer as it has often been understood in the Christian tradition remains possible. The distinction Dawkins has tried to erect is not as airtight as he thinks.

(I’ll be coming back to the idea of God as ’emotionally satisfying’ later, I think. I can hear St. John of the Cross revolving in his grave…)

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

[F]or the vast majority of people, ‘religion’ implies ‘supernatural’ (p.40).

Don’t worry, I’m nearly at the end of Ch.1, §1 now: there’s just this post, one on ‘praying to the law of gravity’, and a summary to come. And I’ll start speeding up, after that. Promise.

Suppose belief in God were the same kind of thing as scientific belief. I mean, suppose that it made sense to regard belief in God as being a scientific hypothesis, subject to fundamentally the same kinds of analysis and judgment as scientific claims. How then would we handle what ‘the vast majority of people’ believe?

Consider a scientific theory like quantum mechanics. For ‘the vast majority of people’, ‘quantum mechanics’ has something to do with stuff being random, indeterministic, imprecise, and woolly at the edges; it has to do with cats being alive and dead at the same time; it has to do, perhaps, with atoms or whatever being kind of smeared out and wavy. Clearly to launch into a critique of the theory as I found it in this popular form, and think that I was actually critiquing quantum mechanics, would be a mistake. Rather, if I wished to critique quantum mechanics, I would go to the experts; I would find the best accounts. And, instead of a whole load of vaguely New Age waffle, I would find a mathematical model of great power and complexity, the applicability of which to physical world has been confirmed experimentally to extraordinary levels of precision.

If belief in God were that kind of thing, if it were something like a scientific theory, my response to Dawkins at this point would be easy. Who cares what ‘the vast majority of people’ believe, I might say; let’s look to the experts. Let’s look at the people who present the most subtle, the most complex, the most sophisticated accounts of the God hypothesis. Let’s look to Spinoza, Maimonides, Ibn Sina, Aquinas. Only if you have wrestled with the complexity and subtlety of their thought can you claim to have tested the God hypothesis, rather than its popular distortions.

That won’t quite do, though, will it? On the one hand, Dawkins’ target is most of all the kind of popular religious belief that shapes all of our social and political lives. Of course, he also thinks that the critique of that popular belief also captures most of the more sophisticated versions (since he thinks he has zeroed in on essential features that popular and sophisticated accounts share). Any sophisticated versions that his comments do not capture are, he seems to think, so different from popular belief they have no business describing themselves with a theological vocabulary that has been so strongly claimed and defined by popular belief. After all, most people who talk about quantum mechanics in popular contexts acknowledge that that language has its real home in labs and lecture halls: they acknowledge that ownership of the language lies elsewhere. But most people who talk about God in popular contexts seem to claim that the home of the language is in their unsophisticated churches and holy books – and if they think about sophisticated interpreters at all, they are likely to think of them as at best irrelevant and at worst traitorous.

On the other hand, the account of theology that I have already given (in answer to Dawkins ‘fairyologist’ accusation) is one that ties itself quite closely to ordinary religious believing. ‘What the theologian-botanist thinks he has in his jars, or the theologian-physicist thinks she has in her particle accelerator’, I said, ‘is not God, but what Christians say and believe about God.’ The Quantum Mechanics analogy does not really hold up, here.

So, instead of a response to Dawkins that simply says, ‘Ignore popular belief, look at more sophisticated accounts’, I’m going to need something a little more subtle. And the best way to get at what I want to say is to start with a fairly bold claim. Christianity is not best thought of as a set of ideas, or as a group of people who assent to a particular set of ideas. Christianity is not a belief system. Christianity is a way of life (or set of ways of life); Christianity is a people (or set of peoples): a folk.

And yes, it is full of stories, statements, claims, declarations, ideas, and opinions, and the play of them shapes this people, this way of life, holding it together, dictating much of how it develops and splits and reacts and evolves and coheres. Faced with this kind of reality, one can, of course, take the claims out of this social mess, treat them as simple, contextless declarations of fact (which is, most of the time, what Dawkins does). If you do so, you will find support in the fact that, in many ways, Christians do bandy the claims about in such a way as to ask for this kind of treatment. But you could also look at the role that those ideas, claims, stories and statements play in forming Christian life, individually and socially, and then ask what claims that life as a whole makes: what needs to be true for that life as a whole to be a meaningful, truthful way of living in the world; what needs to be the case for this way of life to be possible without delusion. And it is this latter turning that much ‘sophisticated’ theology takes.

Such theology is not, as it were, expert knowledge of God as opposed to popular knowledge of God. It is not the real knowledge gained by people who have proper access to God in their labs, as opposed to the distored knowledge that trickles down from the experts to the hoi polloi. If theologians have expertise, it is in the interpretation and testing of the claims about God implied in the whole way of life of Christians, which will certainly be closely related to, but will not simply be identical to, the stories, statements, claims, declarations, ideas, and opinions explicitly present in that way of life.

Let me give you an example. Take popular statements about Jesus of Nazareth being the incarnation of God. If you look at popular stories, statements, claims, declarations, ideas, and opinions about this, you might come up with a picture suggesting that, at a particular point in time, some part of God came down from heaven, and turned into a human being. Taken at face value, as something like a literal description of a state of affairs, it is hard to take this story seriously for very long, because it is very hard to make any sense of it that doesn’t slip away the moment you press it, and very hard to see how it coheres with some of the other things Christians tend to say about God. Press people on their understanding of this, ask them to explain or justify it, or to respond to criticisms, and you’re likely to discover a confusing, implausible mish-mash of ideas.

1. But those stories, statements, claims, declarations, ideas, and opinions help to underwrite and shape a way of life in which people relate to the stories of Jesus in certain ways, construct their lives individually and communally in relation to Jesus in various ways, see the world through Jesus-coloured spectacles in various ways, and so on.
2. And, it turns out that if you look carefully at the history of incarnational belief, and at sophisticated contemporary discussion of it, incarnational doctrine makes considerably more sense as an account of what is claimed or assumed or implied by that whole way of life – what that life implies about the world, about God, and about Jesus of Nazareth.
3. Nevertheless, the more sophisticated account helps one see that the popular ideas do not simply play a functional role, but are pictorial, partial ways of making some of the claims that sophisticated versions of the doctrine make, so that there is something a little analogous to the relationship between popular Quantum Mechanics and real Quantum Mechanics going on, even if it is not the main part of what is going on, and even if the link between the two is more complex in this case.

I haven’t given you any content to that example: I’m not trying to explain or justify the doctrine of the Incarnation at this point; I’m simply trying to help you understand how I see the relationship between sophisticated, philosophically complex discussions of theology and what ‘the vast majority of people’ believe.

All this leaves me with a ragbag of further comments to make.

1. All this gives a little more content to the comment I made about ‘generous interpretation’ when I was asking whether theology was a subject. ‘Generous interpretation’ involves the attempt to do justice to the whole weave of Christian life, and to give as careful account as possible of what is really claimed by that life as a whole.
2. There is an interesting complication to all this. Many Christians acknowledge that their own ideas are but partial and inadequate grasps of something they don’t know how to talk about with precision – and, in this view of things, that is not an admission of any kind of failure on their part: being a Christian is not primarily about understanding a set of claims well. However, some Christians do not make any acknowledgment like this, explicitly or implicitly: they do behave exactly as if their ideas were literal, accurate and fully graspable pictures of what is going on. And some of those who do treat their ideas as gestures in the direction of something they do not grasp may think that theologians achieve greater clarity and precision about what they themselves grasp only dimly, but some will not. None of that stops me interpreting what all these Christians do and say – but it does make the whole thing a bit messier.
3. The pusillanimous quote from the president of a New Jersey historical society that Dawkins gives on p.38 fits right in here. (a) The writer is clearly not convinced that his doubts, his attempts to think through and clarify his beliefs about God, are worth very much – which is the same as his assuming he doesn’t really know how his convictions work. And (b) he clearly has more of a concern with how what he says is going to affect people (shape their lives, rock their boat) than with his ability to argue for or against his conclusions. I am not saying he has drawn the right conclusions, or understood what honesty and integrity require of him, still less that his saying this about himself gives him ground from which to criticise Einstein. I’m simply noting that I think more complex things are going on than is seen by Dawkins (who simply says ‘What a devastatingly revealing letter! Every sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice.’)
4. One last comment. I do not claim at all to have shown the connection between ordinary Christian life and the kind of theological tradition (Aquinas, Maimonides, Spinoza, et al) I have begun to sketch – which isn’t to say that I don’t think the connection is there, or that I’m not going to end up droning on about it ad nauseam at some point soon.

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

Dawkins quotes a selection of religious responses to Einstein’s declaration that he did not believe in a personal God. I’ve already mentioned one of them (the claim that Einstein did not know what he was talking about), but Dawkins provides many others.

There is an ‘American Roman Catholic lawyer’, who says that Einstein’s statements will make Hitler’s decision to ‘expel’ Jews from Germany seem understandable to many (p.37). This is indeed an utterly repulsive statement; I think most people (religious or not) would find it so.

Then there is a ‘New York rabbi’ who said,

Einstein is unquestionably a great scientist, but his religious views are diametrically opposed to Judaism (p.38).

Dawkins comments:

‘But’? ‘But‘? Why not ‘and’?

The easy response is, of course, to read the Rabbi’s statement as meaning, ‘Like most people, I value Einstein’s scientific work – but I have problems with his religious views.’ I’m not quite sure what the fuss is about that ‘but’. I can only think that Dawkins’ incredulity arises either (a) because he thinks Einstein’s religious views flowed directly from his scientific views, so that it is nonsense to claim to value his science whilst denying its obvious implications, or (b) because he thinks that the habits of thought one would need to be able to recognise the greatness of Einstein’s scientific work are precisely the habits of thought eschewed by religious people.

A more interesting quotation, though, is the one from the ‘president of a historical society in New Jersey’. It is interesting for two reasons: Dawkins’ comment, and the content of the quotation given. Dawkins says that the letter ‘damningly exposes the weakness of the religious mind’ and that ‘Every sentence drips with intellectual and moral cowardice’. I can’t help picturing at this point some Basil-Rathbone-as-Sherlock-Holmes figure, saying ‘Ah yes, Watson – but there you see the terrible weakness of the criminal mind; he cannot resist returning to the scene of his evil deeds!’ The trouble is, I think Dawkins really does believe that all religious people are at best weak-minded, and at worst intellectually dishonest. Oh well.

The content of the letter is also, as Dawkins says, worth a look, but I want to come back to it a little later, when I tackle the relationship between ‘ordinary believers’ and theology. I’ll try to remember to do so.

The last letter quoted, from ‘the Founder of the Calvary Tabernacle Association in Oklahoma’ is, as Dawkins promises, shocking. The author tells Einstein to go back where he came from, with his unAmerican views (pp.37-8). And its offensiveness is made up of all sorts of different elements: the writer evidently has a mind in which America, Christianity, creationism, and a pro-Israel, pro-religious-Judaism stance stand against Europe, atheism, evolution, and the temerity that some Jews have in not filling the role that Christians want them to fill. This is a poisonous mindset: the back-handed anti-Semitism, the mythologising of America as a (thoroughly) Christian nation, the assumption that Christianity and creationism go hand-in-glove. Ugh.

Of course, none of this gets us very far. Dawkins wants me to see evidence of the moral and intellectual weakness that are essential to the ‘religious mind’. I see only examples of bad religion. The contest between these two views will evidently not be won or lost here: Dawkins has as yet offered no argument as to why I should see these examples as getting to the heart of religion. Let’s move on.

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

Discussing a clergyman who had criticised Einstein for not knowing what he was talking about, Dawkins comments:

The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed ‘fairyologist’ on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings…. [He] thought that Einstein, being theologically untrained, had misunderstood the nature of God. On the contrary, Einstein understood very well exactly what he was denying.

I find that comment about the ‘fairyologist’ very illuminating. It exposes the model Dawkins has in mind when he talks about ‘theology’, and explains comments that would otherwise be completely baffling. Dawkins sees theologians, I think, as a strange kind of failed botanist. They are botanists who study the habitat and foliage of an entirely non-existent plant – so what could they possibly have to say that would be of any interest (except the interest that comes from deluded people revealing the nature of the twists that distort their minds)? Or perhaps they are more like failed particle physicists, who devote their time to analysing the properties of the strange particle whose interactions they believe dictate the course of the universe – but who refuse to listen to their more sober colleagues who repeatedly explain the mathematical errors in their theoretical proofs, and point out the ways in which all the instrumental readings that are supposed to confirm the existence of this particle are far more easily explained by the properties and quirks of the instruments themselves.

The only trouble with this sort of model of what it is to be a theologian is that it would not allow you to make any sense at all of what actually goes on in a theology department. In other words, it is a model that can itself be tested against empirical reality, and shown to have as much substance as those fairy wings.

Let me talk about my own department (the Department of Theology at the University of Exeter). Suppose Dawkins were to decide, perhaps in order to fill a segment in a new television programme, that he was going to sit in on a degree course here, or join in the research discussions of our staff.

For a start, he would be welcome: there is no requirement that staff or students believe in God (and, yes, we do already have atheist members of staff, and we do already have atheist students). Then he would find himself engaged in a whole set of intellectual pursuits, none of which looks like the failed botanist/physicist model.

He would, for instance, find out a great deal about the history of the Christian tradition, and about the contexts in which the Biblical texts used in Christianity were produced. Part of this study would involve learning about the history of Judaeo-Christian talk about God: how did it arise, what function did it play in the various contexts in which it flourished, what different things have been meant by it? What reasons have been given for and against its different forms? How have different forms of belief in God shaped lives, individually and socially? None of this would require him to believe it himself, but it would require him to become a careful observer – not of God, but of believers in God.

Then, alongside this broadly historical study, he would find himself pursuing philosophical discussion of the claims involved: ‘philosophy of religion’. To take just one example (because it will come up again later): having studied the theology of Anselm of Canterbury in his historical context, Dawkins would in the more philosophical part of the course examine the premises and structure of Anselm’s argument philosophically: seeking as much intellectual clarity and rigour as possible about whether it works, and what the errors are if it does not. (As we shall see, this is a portion of the course I’d recommend wholeheartedly to Dawkins, not because I think Anselm’s argument works as a proof of the existence of God, but because I think Dawkins has misunderstood it). He would end up examining in detail the main arguments for and against the existence of God; he would end up examining in similar detail the coherence and implications of some of the main claims that have been made about God, and so on. He would end up doing quite a bit of moral philosophy: examining the different ways that people have gone about justifiying moral claims, the arguments that religious people have made about those ways, and so on. He would get marks for the clarity and cogency of his arguments, not for whether his conclusions matched any pre-defined religious set of answers.

I suspect that, so far, there is nothing that Dawkins could object to. His book is, after all, packed with precisely these kinds of discussion – claims about what religious believers have believed and do believe (and why), claims about how it shapes their lives and our world, claims about what sense it makes, and the robust rational testing of whether any of it is coherent or justified.

There is, however, a third kind of intellectual work involved – and it is this one which I suspect Dawkins dislikes. This is the kind of intellectual work that does not simply investigate and subject to rational critique the past and present claims made by religious believers, but rather works with those claims to see what can be made of them. It is the kind of intellectual work that can look most like deluded botany or loony physics – until one looks a little closer. It is the kind of work that

1. starts with the results of the kind of historical investigation that exposes the differing things that Christians (for example) have meant by God, and their differing reasons for saying them,
2. tries to give as charitable an interpretation of contemporary Christian belief as possible (with the help of the philosophy of religion where necessary) – i.e., it proposes a ‘take’ on those claims, a way of making sense of them, that is as faithful as possible to what Christians have believed and do believe, but also as coherent and intelligble as possible, and then
3. asks about the implications of Christian belief if it is understood this way. What else does it appear to commit Christians to believing? What practices cohere with it? What challenges are appropriate to it? What questions does it raise?

What this kind of study works on is still Christian believing. What the theologian-botanist thinks he has in his jars, or the theologian-physicist thinks she has in her particle accelerator, is not God, but what Christians say and believe about God. To undertake this kind of study, you do not have to believe in God, but you do have to believe that there are people who do believe in God. And you do not have to believe that they are right in what they believe – but you do have to believe that at least some of them, some of the time, think about their faith and are open to argument, and you do have to believe that those who are thoughtful and open to argument would do well to think as carefully as possible, to understand the implications of what they say, to know more about alternative ways of making sense of the things they talk about, to see what kinds of claim they are implicitly making about the world in which they live, and so on.

Let me take an example from my own Department (simplified for the sake of presentation). A theologian might examine some of the things that Christians say about what was going on on Jesus’s cross. This theologian might examine in historical and contemporary Christianity the development of the relevant ideas, and note the connections between those ideas and Christian attitudes to crime and punishment. He might then point out that what is now regularly taken in some prominent strands of Christianity to be the main or only way of making sense of the cross (a) has a strong link to some questionable aspects of Christian (and wider) views about the punishment of criminals, and (b) is not the only way of making sense of the cross that has been prominent in the Christian tradition. He might then demonstrate (c) that there are good reasons based on some of the other beliefs and commitments that these same contemporary Christians have – i.e., reasons that those Christians themselves should in principle accept – to see flaws in both the ideas about the cross they currently have, and the attitudes to penal policy, and he might then argue (d) that to shift to another way of understanding the cross that will do better justice to their other convictions, and (e) that it might have rather different implications for their understanding of crime and punishment.

Note several things about this example. (1) One would not need oneself to be a believer to undertake this study – though one would need to be a thoughtful and sensitive interpreter of belief – tuned in not just to the surface details of what Christian people say and do, but to the deeper patterns of thought and sensibility that underlie those details. One would need, as it were, to be something like a good ethnographer of Christian culture. (I should add, just in case any one identifies the example, that the real theologian I am using as an example is a Christian believer, as it happens.) (2) Each step of this can be pursued with intellectual rigour. Is this what a dominant group of contemporary Christians really think? Did earlier Christians really believe rather different things? Are the connections between theological belief and social attitudes real? Are there really reasons amongst the other convictions of those contemporary Christians for critiquing this view, and preferring another? And so on. (3) Even if one thinks of this as an investigation of, and a making of suggestions about, the false beliefs of deluded people, it might well be worth doing, and worth doing well: it has the potential to make an impact for the better on what those people say and do. (4) None of this involves the theologian in making the kinds of claim that a theologian-as-quasi-botanist would make: if the theologian says, ‘God is not like that, but like this’, that is not based on him having taken some kind of measurement of God, or having simply made one up in the absence of such measurements – it is always a way of saying ‘The God that you believe in is, according to what you believe, to the sources you base your belief on, and to the other things you say you believe, not like that, but like this’: it is always, always, always an attempted repair of an existing pattern of thought and belief.

Even an atheist should be able to agree both that there is a real subject matter here, and that there is the possibility of real rigour and intellectual integrity in this discussion. The only points which seem to me controversial are (a) the claim that at least some religious people do think about what they believe, have reasons for it, and are open to discussing those reasons and their implications; and (b) the claim that even if Dawkins is right, and the central premise of these Christians’ belief is wrong, it would still be a good thing if (until they saw the wider error of their ways) they thought carefully and argued intelligently about what they believed.

For (a), you can rest assured: I know from experience that this is true.

And (b)? Well, I guess I just have a touching faith in the importance of careful thinking.

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

Dawkins opposes supernaturalism to naturalism, unsurprisingly enough. He provides the following definitions, the first from Julian Baggini’s Atheism: A Very Short Introduction:

although there is only one kind of stuff in the universe, and it is physical, out of this stuff comes minds, beauty, emotions, moral values – in short, the full gamut of phenomena that gives richness to human life (quoted on p.34)

there is nothing beyond the natural, physical world, no supernatural creative intelligence lurking behind the observable universe, no soul that outlasts the body and no miracles – except in the sense of natural phenomena that we don’t yet understand. (p.35)

He also adds further elaboration from Einstein:

I have never attributed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic (p.36).

The matters touched on here are all matters about which religious people generally, and Christians specifically, differ widely. It would be possible, but facile, to take each element of the description of naturalism given above and wheel out examples of Christians who stood on Dawkins’ side of the great divide. I want to try something rather different, as a bit of a thought experiment. I want to ask how far someone who remained recognisably within the theological tradition I have sketched, which Einstein himself may possibly have had a toehold in (though maybe not), someone who was fully committed to some form of the central claims about God that I have sketched, could go along with ‘naturalism’, as Dawkins described it. Even if in practice many or most of those who stand within this tradition would differ more markedly from Dawkins than the position I am about to set out, this thought experiment will help us understand whether Dawkins’ naturalism/supernaturalism opposition captures what is essential to this fairly mainstream theological tradition of thought about God.

So, at its most naturalist, the kind of theological tradition I have been discussing need imply no commitment to the view that there is any kind of stuff in the universe other than physical stuff. It need imply no commitment to the view that, as science explores the regularities of efficient causation that tie all this stuff into one cosmos, there is anywhere that science cannot go, or anywhere that it will prove inadequate to that task of causal explanation. It need imply, in other words, no rejection of the idea that the physical sciences are capable of talking about everything that there is.

If ‘soul’ is taken to mean some kind of entity consisting of another kind of stuff than physical, separable from the body, then this theological tradition need imply no commitment to the soul. If ‘a purpose or goal’ to ‘Nature’ is taken to refer to a different kind of explanation, one designed to fill gaps, inadequacies, or improbabilities in the explanations offered by science, then this tradition need imply no commitment to purpose or goal. If ‘miracle’ is taken to mean a disruption of the otherwise unvarying regularities that structure the cosmos, a break in natural laws, then this tradition need not even be committed to the miraculous.

However, this tradition does require one to say that when everything has been said by science, its properly total description and explanation given, there remain different things to be said. The world that is adequately described by science can also be ‘read’ in another way – not as an alternative form of explanation, not as a supplement to the gaps left by science, but as a different kind of grasp of, or take on, the whole – more aesthetic than explanatory.

And, yes, that way of seeing the whole suggests that one cannot talk about the world without talking about God, and that talk about the world is therefore incomplete without reference to God, but this reference to God is not doing the same kind of work that reference to kinds of stuff and patterns of explanation do in science. God, for this way of thinking, is not made of or responsible for any mysterious kind of non-physical stuff; God is not a gremlin in the world’s machine, tinkering with its regular running. God is not an ‘oh, and there’s one more thing’ addition to the list of the things that comprise ‘everything that there is’: God, in this tradition, is more like the context for them all.

Yes, this theological way of talking about the world is one that will almost certainly involve some kind of talk about purpose or goal, some kind of teleology to the world – but it does not have to do so in such a way as to get into a direct argument with scientific explanation. Yes, this theological way of talking about the world may involve talk about miracles, as states of affairs which particularly clearly and intensely call for, and call forth, a God-centred way of seeing – but it does not need to have a stake in the inexplicability of the events in question. And yes, this theological way of talking about the world may involve talk about souls, but that will be precisely as another, God-focused way of talking about exactly the same human beings that the naturalist talks about: wholly physical, wholly enmeshed in and structured by the laws of nature, wholly describable by science. Talk about ‘soul’ can properly be another way of talking about the same mind, beauty, emotion, and moral value that science rightly understands as emerging from physical stuff.

[Edit: That last sentence is misleading. I don’t mean that ‘soul’ in this theological tradition could be just another name for the ‘mind, beauty, emotion and moral value’ that science can speak about. Rather, to speak about souls is to say something about the human beings who have such ‘mind, beauty, emotion and moral value’. I was not specifying what would be said, only what it would be said about. I’d echo here what I said about the world as a whole. To talk about ‘soul’ in this context is to recognise that when everything has been said by science, its properly total description and explanation of human life given, there remain different things to be said. The human beings who are adequately described by science can also be ‘read’ in another way – not as an alternative form of explanation, not as a supplement to the gaps left by science, but as a different kind of grasp of, or take on, the whole.]