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.

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

Just a minor point

Dawkins complains about the

privileging of religion in public discussions of ethics in the media and in government…. Why does our society beat a path to their door, as though they had some expertise comparable to that of, say, a moral philosopher, a family lawyer, or a doctor?

Now it so happens that a lot of religious leaders are (a) trained to a certain extent in moral philosophy, and (b) experienced at dealing pastorally with many of the ethical situations in question. However, I suspect that has nothing to do with why the media beat a path to their door. Some, perhaps most of that path-beating is no doubt a knee-jerk, rent-a-voice reaction, or the product of a lazy association of religion and morality that Dawkins is right to question. Nevertheless, the media presumably also beat this path because they regard the leaders in question as spokespeople for quite sizable constituencies who tend to have an interest in ethical issues. That is, to the extent that a charitable interpretation of this media habit is possible, I guess the explanation has less to do with respect, less to do with expertise, and more to do with the nature of religions as (loose, complex) affiliations of people into some kind of variegated community.

The God Delusion, ch.1, §§1-2

This isn’t a comment on a specific passage from Dawkins’ book; it’s simply a reflection on where my response has got to. There is one stretch of my argument that I can hear creaking as I walk over it (unless I tread fast and whistle loudly): the bridge between my account of the sophisticated intellectual tradition of Christian theology (which I believe Dawkins’ categories fail to capture) and ordinary Christian believing.

I think I can best get at the problem by asking what it would actually mean for Christianity to be rational. (I continue to focus on Christianity because it is the only example I know well.) For Dawkins, the answer to that question will fundamentally be about the subjecting of a set of ideas (or one central idea) to certain kinds of argumentative testing, and assessment of various kinds of evidence for and against. Ideas, arguments, evidence: these will be the main things that need to be talked about in order to answer the question, ‘Is Christianity rational?’ There will be a peripheral, preparatory role for description of Christianity: enough to establish that the ideas in question are indeed held by significant numbers of ordinary Christians – but on the whole Dawkins thinks that claim obvious enough to need no explicit presentation of evidence or argument.

My answer to the question ‘Is Christianity rational?’ would be rather different, with what is peipheral and preparatory for Dawkins becoming much more central. That is, faced with the vast weave of movements, institutions, practices, habits, tendencies, stories, ideas, sensibilities that we name ‘Christianity’, I would talk about the way that this complex social whole includes practices of ‘sense-making’: moments where individuals and groups within Christianity take a step back and come up (as a secondary but important move within their participation in this whole weave) with some explicit construal, some way of trying to capture ‘what is going on’. And then I would want to talk about the way in which, within certain practics, by certain people, those construals get subjected to various kinds of testing and refinement, and the way in which they what emerges gets offered back to the wider Christian population. That is, I’d want to talk about certain kinds of feedback loop that operate within Christianity – fundamentally social feedback loops. And I’d do all this in order then to claim (a) that it is only together, only in this kinds of social way, that Christianity is rational, and (b) that the ‘sophisticated’ claims of theologians are one such feedback loop that helps keep Christianity rational, and the one that provides something most like the kind of testing that Dawkins wants to see belief in God subjected to. Only once all that is in place can I really get going on discussing what kinds of arguments and evidence are relevant to testing the claims that are made in these sophisticated construals of the Christian thing.

Now, I rather suspect that Dawkins would have none of this. He might see this as a rather dishonest attempt to shift the attention from mainstream, majority forms of belief in God to deeply eccentric minority forms. He might argue that these sophisticated minority forms have little to do with the beliefs and practices of ordinary Christians, and that there is something dishonest or perverse in the attempt of the sophisticated analysts to claim that they are somehow speaking on behalf of those ordinary Christians.

Of course, I’d launch some criticisms back: I’d argue that Dawkins is himself involved in providing a particular, contestable construal of the Christian thing: he construes it (I think) as fundamentally a matter of the holding of certain beliefs, as a system of belief. And I don’t think that’s an adequate construal, I don’t think it does justice to the evidence. It is at very least not a construal that should be allowed to slip past without explicit argument.

However, that argument aside, Dawkins does have a point. Even if Christianity’s rationality did take the form that I have suggested, one might well argue that there has been a breakdown in (or a failure to create) the kind of social connections, the kind of feedback loops, that I have suggested are essential to that rationality. There are fractures both in the connections which are supposed to keep the theologians’ construals faithful to the lives of ordinary Christian believers, and in the connections which are supposed to allow their construals to return to and influence those ordinary believers. (I’d like to argue, for instance, that ‘literalism’ of various kinds is not so much an intellectual error, but a breakdown in polity: a flattening of the intellectual ecology that keeps various different levels and kinds of reading, of sense-making, alive and interacting.)

I think the narrative Dawkins is selling, to the extent that it gets into people’s hearts and minds and begins to structure their responses (whether they accept his narrative or reject it) will make this problem worse. I think that it will make it harder for people to believe in the possibility of fruitful connection between ‘ordinary’ and ‘sophisticated’ belief. And so I think that his attack on Christianity, because of the bluntness and flatness of the categories in which it is couched, has the capacity to make Christianity less rational.

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.