Pisteutics: Atheism: Reviews of missionary for atheism, Richard Dawkins, pour forth from the intellectual press

.
Dawkins' Atheistic Mission to Convert Christians?
watch for the reply by Alvin Plantinga which
appeared briefly on
Faith-Science Newsletter (Dec26,2k6), and is now
scheduled for republication on Books & Culture

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The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Houghton Mifflin, 406 pp., $27.00
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Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief
by Lewis Wolpert
Norton, 243 pp., $25.95
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Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist
by Joan Roughgarden
Island, 151 pp., $14.95

Scientists' interest in religion seems to come in waves. One arrived after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859. Another followed in the 1930s and 1940s, inspired by surprising revelations from quantum mechanics, which suggested the insufficiency of conventional physical theories of the universe. And now scientists are once again writing about religion, apparently provoked this time by the controversy surrounding intelligent design.

During the last year, a number of popular books on religion by scientists or philosophers of science have appeared. Daniel Dennett kicked things off with his Breaking the Spell (2006), an investigation into the possibility of a science of religion. Reviewing evolutionary, psychological, and economic theories of the origin and spread of belief, Dennett covered much ground but reached few conclusions. In the last few months, three prominent scientists�all biologists�have published their own books on belief. Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, has given us The God Delusion, an extended polemic against faith, which will be considered at length below.

H. Allen Orr, NY Review of Books

Sorry but I couldn't get the link I had to work so you could click-up the h+ly interesting and inflammatory full-length review from which I've briefly quoted.

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Hat Tip for the first of what turned out to be many s+tings of reviews of the new Dawkins book; also a double HT for the link to the Weinberg article of which the text is reproduced temporarily below (I also have lost my direct link to the Weinberg article). Oh yes, the HT x 2 goes to Faith-Science Newsletter, Jack Haas, editor. My reply to Weinberg:

In an ill-advised book review inappropriately appearing in London UK's Times Literary Supplement, one of Richard Dawkins' own narrow creed of scientistic naturalism, is selected to write-up the latest anti-Christian book-binge of his own sectmate (Steven Weingberg reviews Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion [see above]). Of course, Weinberg doesn't pause to tell us that Dawkins' title resonates the little book by Sigmund Freud written after he was driven out of Vienna by fellow atheists (that is, Nazis) to arrive in London where shortly he became excessively nonplussed by the h+ percentage there of psychonanalysts who were professing Christians. Freud wrote The Future of an Illusion (1927) in which he sawt the purification of his movement. "For Freud, religion was a primitive attempt to deal with the frightening realities of the world and the impossibility of satisfying our fundamental desires. Religion, in his view, was a response to that fear and longing. Love for and fear of the [law-giving] father [see Julia Kristeva on the latter theme in her still-Freud-led theory of the parents -- Owlb] found symbolic expression, he thought, in the major religious traditions." For me, it's interesting that the Dutch Christian philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977) mentions only one specific book by Freud, and that book is the one just cited.

Where Darwin preceeded Freud, and was adopted by the Father of Psychoanalysis to supply a metaphysical substructure (naturalism via evolutionary biology) to the psychoanalytic worldview, Dawkins comes after Freud to give us an extended and embellished Darwin, a supplemented "Darwin" (Derrida), a post-Freud "Darwin" who is not skeptical or agnostic about the existence of God but who is downr+t oppositionary to the very idea. To pull this off, both Dawkins and his reviewer Weinberg have erase the whole school of atheistic social-Darwinists, another offshoot of Charles Darwin that the author of The Origin of Species by Natural Selection (1857) never himself contemplated, in any record he left the later generations of his meticulous biographers.

The Social Darwinists were largely atheists and were often racists, which Social- Darwinist atheist racism is often considered Darwinian in opposition to Kantian universalism (but on the existential side, Kant also was at lest a 1 degree racist on a scale of 1-to-10). But again we face an extension of Darwin's own ideas in ways he would never recognize, indeed could not have recognized because to these developments he is an antecedant only, a figure who postherited numerous offspring who each had other antecdants -- not Freud alone (this is a CPHM nicety). Some of these latterday Freudians went far beyond what the fountainhead himself could have imagined, as they kept arriving a whole series of European zeitgeists later (zeitgeist rapidation in Europe).

But putting Social "Darwinism" and Freudian "Darwinism" aside, Weinberg continues his project of erasure also in regard to the history of atheism in Europe, and its role in motivating Communism and Nazism in the destruction of European humanity. Weinberg doesn't resource Dawkins from this extreme historiographical bias which both biologists-ideologists use as the lynch-pin in their diatribes against Christians and Christian faith. It never comes across clearly that these two neo-Darwinists have weied with fairness the atrocities that have come forth from both Christianity (in distinction from the Lordship of Jesus Christ and faith in Him), and also the atrocities that have come forth from European atheism (this is no place to try to take up the case of atheist Buddhism, which also is not smudgeless -- witness Sri Lankan Buddhism, Thai Buddhism, and Burmese/Myanmar Buddhistm today--and, of course, there are counter tendencies among the Buddhists protected and persecuted by their Generals in these countries).

In any case, Dawkins treats Christianity and Islam as moral equivalents -- wicked! -- while atheism is not evaluated similarly as a historical force subject to the interplay of good and evil which is the human condition--Christians in the course of time, not excluded, of course! As Arts&Letters Daily puts physicist Weinberg's stance: "Richard Dawkins’s nice way of deploring both Islam and Christianity is well meant, but it is folly. Not all religions are equally dangerous...." But even Weinberg doesn't feel the need to differentiate among the historical forces of atheism--from the Killing Fields of Cambodia to the Gulag Archipelago to the Stalin-generated starvation of the Ukrainian peasantry to the slawter of innocents by the Nazis to protect the latter ideology's Darwinistically-conceived biological bloodlines (Nazi ideology's second phase, which was also intensely anti-homo, whereas in Hitler's first phase backed by Gen. Rohm of the Old Regime who was famously a Sparanist-homo (the change of phase was marked by the N+te of the Long Knives).

A deadly certitude (Jan17, 2k7) London (UK)

Steven Weinberg

book-reviewing:


Richard Dawkins
The god delusion
416pp. Bantam. £20.
0 593 05548 9
(US: Houghton Mifflin. $27. 0618680004)

Of all the scientific discoveries that have disturbed the religious mind, none has had the impact of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. No advance of physics or even cosmology has produced such a shock. In the early days of Christianity, the Church Fathers Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria rejected the knowledge, common since the time of Plato, that the Earth is a sphere. They insisted on the literal truth of the Bible, and from Genesis to Revelation verses could be interpreted to mean that the Earth is flat. But the evidence for a spherical Earth was overwhelming to anyone who had seen a ship’s hull disappear below the horizon while its masts were still visible, and in the end the flat Earth did not seem worth a fight. By the high Middle Ages, the spherical Earth was accepted by educated Christians. Dante, for example, found the core of the spherical Earth a convenient destination for sinners. What was once a serious issue has become a joke. A friend at the University of Kansas has formed a Flat Earth Society to demand – in mockery of the demand by Kansas creationists that schools present “Intelligent Design” as an “alternative” to evolution – that Kansas public schools teach flat-Earth theory as an “alternative” to spherical-Earth theory.

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The more radical idea that the Earth moves around the Sun was harder to accept. After all, the Bible puts mankind at the centre of a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation, so how could our Earth not be at the centre of the universe? Until the nineteenth century, Copernican astronomy could not be taught at Salamanca or other Spanish universities, but by Darwin’s time it troubled hardly anyone. Even as early as the time of Galileo, Cardinal Baronius, the Vatican librarian, famously quipped that the Bible tells us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.

A different challenge to religion emerged with Newton. His theories of motion and gravitation showed how natural phenomena could be explained without divine intervention, and were opposed on religious grounds at Newton’s own university by John Hutchinson. But opposition to Newtonianism in Europe collapsed before the close of the eighteenth century. Believers could comfort themselves with the thought that miracles were simply occasional exceptions to Newton’s laws, and anyway mathematical physics was unlikely to disturb those who did not understand its explanatory power.

Darwinism was different. It was not just that the theory of evolution, like the theory of a spherical moving Earth, is in conflict with biblical literalism; it was not just that evolution, like the Copernican theory, denied a central status to humans; and it was not just that evolution, like Newton’s theory, provided a non-religious explanation for natural phenomena that had seemed inexplicable without divine intervention. Much worse, among the natural phenomena explained by natural selection were the very features of humanity of which we are most proud. It became plausible that our love for our mates and children, and, according to the work of modern evolutionary biologists, even more abstract moral principles, such as loyalty, charity and honesty, have an origin in evolution, rather than in a divinely created soul.

Given the battering that traditional religion has taken from the theory of evolution, it is fitting that the most energetic, eloquent and uncompromising modern adversaries of religion are biologists who helped us to understand evolution: first Francis Crick, and now Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, Dawkins caps a series of his books on biology and religion with a swingeing attack on every aspect of religion – not just traditional religion, but also the vaguer modern assortment of pieties that often appropriates its name. In the unkindest cut of all, Dawkins even argues that the persistence of belief in God is itself an outcome of natural selection – acting perhaps on our genes, as argued by Dean Hamer in The God Gene, but more certainly on our “memes”, the bundles of cultural beliefs and attitudes that in a Darwinian though non-biological way tend to be passed on from generation to generation. It is not that the meme helps the believer or the believer’s genes to survive; it is the meme itself that by its nature tends to survive.

For instance, the persistence of belief in a particular religion is naturally aided if that religion teaches that God punishes disbelief. Such a religion tends to survive if the threatened punishment is sufficiently awful. In contrast, a religion would have trouble keeping converts in line if it taught that infidels are subject after death to only a brief spell of mild discomfort, after which they join the faithful in eternal bliss. So it is natural that in traditional Christianity and Islam, disbelief became the ultimate crime, and Hell the ultimate torture chamber. No wonder the mathematician Paul Erdos always referred to God as the Supreme Fascist. Dawkins’s book focuses on Christianity and Islam, which traditionally emphasize the importance of belief, rather than on religions like Judaism, Hinduism or Shinto, which are tied to specific ethnic groups, and tend to stress observance more than faith.

Dawkins, like Erdos, dislikes God. He calls the God of the Old Testament “the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynist, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully”. As for the New Testament, he quotes with approval the opinion of Thomas Jefferson, that “The Christian God is a being of a terrific character – cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust”. This is strong stuff, and Dawkins obviously intends to shock the reader, but his invective has a constructive purpose. By attacking the God of sacred Scripture, he is trying to weaken the authority of that God’s commands – commands whose interpretation has led humanity to a shameful history of inquisitions, crusades and jihads. Dawkins treats the reader to many brutal details, but we only have to look at today’s headlines to supply our own. For some reason, Dawkins does not comment on the God of the Koran, who would seem to provide equal opportunities for invective.

The reviews of The God Delusion in the New York Times and the New Republic took Dawkins to task for his contemptuous rejection of the classic “proofs” of the existence of God. I agree with Dawkins in his rejection of these proofs, but I would have answered them a little differently. The “ontological proof” of St Anselm asks us first to agree that it is possible to conceive of something than which nothing greater can be conceived. Once that agreement is obtained, the sly philosopher points out that the thing conceived of must exist, since if it did not then something just like it that actually exists would thereby be greater. And what could this greatest actually existing thing be, but God? QED. From the monk Gaunilo in Anselm’s time to philosophers in our own such as J. L. Mackie and Alvin Plantinga, there is general agreement that Anselm’s proof is flawed, though they disagree about what the flaw is. My own view is that the proof is circular: it is not true that one can conceive of something than which nothing greater can be conceived unless one first assumes the existence of God. Anselm’s “proof” has reappeared and been refuted in many different forms, it is a little like an infectious disease that can be defeated by an antibiotic, but which then evolves so that it needs to be defeated all over again.

The “cosmological proof” is no better logically, but it does have a certain appeal to the physicist. In essence, it argues that everything has a cause, and since this chain of causality cannot go on forever, it must terminate in a first cause, which we call God. The idea of an ultimate cause is deeply attractive, and indeed the dream of elementary particle physics is to find the final theory at the root of all chains of explanation of what we see in nature. The trouble is that such a mathematical final theory would hardly be what anyone means by God. Who prays to quantum mechanics? The believer may justly argue that no theory of physics can be a first cause, since we would still wonder why nature is governed by that theory, rather than some other. Yet, in just the same sense, God cannot be a first cause either, for whatever our conception of God we could still wonder why the world is governed by that sort of God, rather than some other.

The “proof” that has historically been most persuasive is the argument from design. The world in general (and life in particular) is supposed to be so marvellously shaped that it could only have been the handiwork of the supreme Designer. The great achievement of scientists from Newton to Crick and Dawkins has been to refute this argument by explaining the world.

I find it disturbing that Thomas Nagel in the New Republic dismisses Dawkins as an “amateur philosopher”, while Terry Eagleton in the London Review of Books sneers at Dawkins for his lack of theological training. Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of philosophy or religion are only to be expressed by experts, not mere scientists or other common folk? It is like saying that only political scientists are justified in expressing views on politics. Eagleton’s judgement is particularly inappropriate; it is like saying that no one is entitled to judge the validity of astrology who cannot cast a horoscope.

Where I think Dawkins goes wrong is that, like Henry V after Agincourt, he does not seem to realize the extent to which his side has won. Setting aside the rise of Islam in Europe, the decline of serious Christian belief among Europeans is so widely advertised that Dawkins turns to the United States for most of his examples of unregenerate religious belief. He attributes the greater regard for religion in the US to the fact that Americans have never had an established Church, an idea he may have picked up from Tocqueville. But although most Americans may be sure of the value of religion, as far as I can tell they are not very certain about the truth of what their own religion teaches. According to a recent article in the New York Times, American evangelists are in despair over a poll that showed that only 4 per cent of American teenagers will be “Bible-believing Christians” as adults. The spread of religious toleration provides evidence of the weakening of religious certitude. Most Christian groups have historically taught that there is no salvation without faith in Christ. If you are really sure that anyone without such faith is doomed to an eternity of Hell, then propagating that faith and suppressing disbelief would logically be the most important thing in the world – far more important than any merely secular virtues like religious toleration. Yet religious toleration is rampant in America. No one who publicly expressed disrespect for any particular religion could be elected to a major office.

Even though American atheists might have trouble winning elections, Americans are fairly tolerant of us unbelievers. My many good friends in Texas who are professed Christians do not even try to convert me. This might be taken as evidence that they don’t really mind if I spend eternity in Hell, but I prefer to think (and Baptists and Presbyterians have admitted it to me) that they are not all that certain about Hell and Heaven. I have often heard the remark (once from an American priest) that it is not so important what one believes; the important thing is how we treat each other. Of course, I applaud this sentiment, but imagine trying to explain “not important what one believes” to Luther or Calvin or St Paul. Remarks like this show a massive retreat of Christianity from the ground it once occupied, a retreat that can be attributed to no new revelation, but only to a loss of certitude.

Much of the weakening of religious certitude in the Christian West can be laid at the door of science; even people whose religion might incline them to hostility to the pretensions of science generally understand that they have to rely on science rather than religion to get things done. But this has not happened to anything like the same extent in the world of Islam. One finds in Islamic countries not only religious opposition to specific scientific theories, as occasionally in the West, but a widespread religious hostility to science itself. My late friend, the distinguished Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam, tried to convince the rulers of the oil-rich states of the Persian Gulf to invest in scientific education and research, but he found that though they were enthusiastic about technology, they felt that pure science presented too great a challenge to faith. In 1981, the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt called for an end to scientific education. In the areas of science I know best, though there are talented scientists of Muslim origin working productively in the West, for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading. This is despite the fact that in the ninth century, when science barely existed in Europe, the greatest centre of scientific research in the world was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

Alas, Islam turned against science in the twelfth century. The most influential figure was the philosopher Abu Hamid al-Ghazzali, who argued in The Incoherence of the Philosophers against the very idea of laws of nature, on the ground that any such laws would put God’s hands in chains. According to al-Ghazzali, a piece of cotton placed in a flame does not darken and smoulder because of the heat, but because God wants it to darken and smoulder. After al-Ghazzali, there was no more science worth mentioning in Islamic countries.

The consequences are hideous. Whatever one thinks of the Muslims who blow themselves up in crowded cities in Europe or Israel or fly planes into buildings in the US, who could dispute that the certainty of their faith had something to do with it? George W. Bush and many others would have us believe that terrorism is a distortion of Islam, and that Islam is a religion of peace. Of course, it is good policy to say this, but statements about what “Islam is” make little sense. Islam, like all other religions, was created by people, and there are potentially as many different versions of Islam as there are people who profess to be Muslims. (The same remarks apply to Eagleton’s highly personal account of what Christianity “is”.) I don’t know on what ground one can say that a peaceable well-intentioned person like Abdus Salam was any more a true Muslim than the murderous holy warriors of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, the clerics throughout the world of Islam who incite hatred and violence, and those Muslims who demonstrate against supposed insults to their faith, but not against the atrocities committed in its name. (Incidentally, Abdus Salam regarded himself as a devout Muslim, but he belonged to a sect that most Muslims consider heretical, and for years was not allowed to return to Pakistan.) Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world, and in the harm it does. Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced. I share his lack of respect for all religions, but in our times it is folly to disrespect them all equally.

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Steven Weinberg is Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Texas. He is a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics and the US National Medal of Science, and is a foreign member of the Royal Society of London. His books include The First Three Minutes (1977), Dreams of a Final Theory (1992), and Facing Up (2001).

An interspersed analysis and critique of Weinberg's "alternative" to Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, hopefully, will be developed.I will cutting, interspersing, and updating this blog-entry for a whlie on refWrite's frontpage. Later the by-then-much-rewritten blog-entry will be moved to page 2.

--Owlb