Richard Dawkins, Atheism, and Christianity: Part 2

December 5th, 2006 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (1) |

Because there were several thoughtful responses to the the original post, I have decided to write a follow-up.

To do so, I shall enlist the help of Marilynne Robinson, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Gilead. Robinson recently wrote a review of The God Delusion for the November edition of Harper’s entitled Hysterical Scientism: The ecstasy of Richard Dawkins. Although Harper’s doesn’t have any articles online, a full transcript is available here. I encourage you to read the article in full, but I will be quoting it much in this post.

Robinson begings by summarizing Dawkins’ crusade against religion:

There is no doubt in Dawkins’s mind that the evils of the world are to be laid at the doorstep of the church, mosque, and synagogue, and that science must be our salvation… because Dawkins implicitly defines science as a clear-eyed quest for truth, chaste as an algorithm, while religion is atavistic, mad, and mired in crime.

She theorizes that The God Delusion is published at a time when the “tectonics of culture are suddenly active”:

This view [that religion is the "great Satan"] is commonplace now, in part because the institutions of religion, like the institutions of journalism and government, have done a great deal to trivialize or disgrace themselves lately.

Although she doesn’t provide any specific examples, I agree with her, and this is more of what I was getting at in my last post. I would also add that the media has had a forceful hand in this so-called tectonic shift. No specfific vein of Christianity is at fault (although some get more attention than others¹), and to say so would be pointing out the speck in someone else’s eye while ignoring the log in my (our) own.

Robinson continues to point out that science is not without its own historical blunders, namely Hitler and the use science (in the form of genetics) to justify the systematic eradication of the Jews. Dawkins tries to cover this by calling it “insane” and “unscientific”, but Robinson sees otherwise. “Bad science,” she says, “is still science in more or less the same sense that bad religion is still religion.” If religion is to be scrutinized under a microscope, science should be held to the same standard:

To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison… If by “science” is meant authentic science, then “religion” must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

It was refreshing to see Robinson espousing some of the same arguments as myself. In my previous post, I said “Developments in quantum physics and other disciplines have pointed to an ever-increasing (and perhaps fluctuating) complexity of the universe. I simply don’t find it necessary to look to science for answers that science isn’t apt to provide.” Robinson agrees (and does so much more eloquently):

The finer-grained the image of reality physicists achieve, the more alien it appears to every known strategy of comprehension. The odd thing about Dawkins’s work, considering his job description, is that it does not itself seem the product of a mind informed by the physics of the last century or so.

Maybe I’m on the right track after all.

I am aware that this post contains little analysis on my part. In Part 3 of this series, I will examine more closely how Dawkins effectively traps himself in modernity and consider whether or not his theses are effectual in our postmodern age.

1. E.g., the “caricaturized-psycho-Christian” to whom I referred in the previous post. ↩