The Great Stage: February 2011

- presented as part of "New Atheism: Just Another Dogma?" - Hegel Summer School, February 12, 2010

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of fact. - Darwin

It is not the victory of science that distinguishes us, but the victory of scientific method over science. - Nietzsche

What may human apprehension bring to mind

But pity at the subdivision of
Existence into rules and miracles -
The one subduing godhead to the floor
The other drifting high defiantly?
- Peter Porter

All thought bears the mark of its time and thinking that doesn't at least try its hand at thinking about thinking - thinking that doesn't "think itself" to use an Hegelian phrase - bears the mark of its time unmistakably. The same is true, I want to argue today, of contemporary atheism and especially of its most famous tract, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

How does the problem play out in contemporary atheism at large? In this presentation I will try to make the case that radical evangelical Christianity defines the contemporary atheist agenda in a way Dawkins and other New Atheists show few signs of being able to think through. In short my argument will be that the way New Atheists are locked in opposition to the latest, ugliest forms of Christian fundamentalism - the way they conflate what they dislike about contemporary fundamentalism with religion as a whole - limits the power and validity of their critique of religion.

However, the problem isn't merely the fights New Atheism tries to pick with religion. It is also, in a strong sense, a social problem. In the form of a movement, New Atheism has several of the characteristic marks of the consumerist society into which it thrusts its message of liberation from religion and, curiously, some of the marks of contemporary religious fundamentalism too. An interesting starting point, if we want to think about the movement's wider place in society, might be the rolling festival conditions that went by the name of the Darwin bi-centenary year (2009) – in which many of New Atheism’s most prominent standard-bearers again played a leading role. Here’s a snapshot of that year-long strangeness, as described by Stephen Shapin in the LRB:

“Darwin had an anniversary Facebook group dedicated to him: its goal was to have 200,000 unique Happy Birthdays posted by 12 February and a million ‘friends’ by the November anniversary of the Origin [of Species]. The group also planned a mass ‘Happy Birthday, Darwin’ sing-along, but I don’t think this actually happened. Then there were the Darwin-themed T-shirts, teddy bears, bobbleheads, tote bags, coffee mugs, fridge magnets, mouse mats, scatter cushions and pet bowls; the ‘Darwin loves you’ bumper stickers, the ‘Darwin Is My Homeboy’ badges, and the ‘I ♥ Darwinism’ thongs. The opening line of the year’s most substantial historical contribution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause, is: ‘Global brands don’t come much bigger than Charles Darwin.’"

In short, like the Darwin Bicentenary, the trade-mark Atheism of Today has its kitsch, its in-jokes, its marketing drives, its mass conventions celebrating the life of Science, Reason and Truth. In the form of Australia's Catherine Deveney [link], it has its easy ironies and preferred obscenities. And in Richard Dawkins it has one of a number of vigorous superstars – an undoubtedly powerful mind shooting sparks that light up the night sky of the contemporary cultural landscape - not just with argument, but with ad campaigns, neon-lit help-lines for people trying to quit the church and, of course, popular intellectual products like the rollicking 400pp harangue I’m going to talk to you about today.

Though intended as a critique of all religion, The God Delusion turns out to be not much more than a tilt against contemporary religious fundamentalism, especially of the Christian variety. And today I want to try to get to the bottom of why that is the case. In part, it has to do with the opening chapters, where Dawkins merrily reduces all forms of religious belief to a rather dubious "God hypothesis" and then sets about aggressively disproving it. In part it comes down to the final three or four chapters, where the book turns into a catalogue of the vindictive nuttiness on display in small-town Christian America. In the middle we get a concerted and, as far as I can judge, successful attempt to use evolutionary biology to show that the intellectual centrepiece of modern fundamentalism, the theory of “Intelligent Design”, is an unnecessary and tendentious folly. And while the case against Intelligent Design shows us Richard Dawkins at his forensic, pop-scientific best, it still has a fairly narrow focus: the attempts by a small number of American fundamentalists to give their literal reading of the Bible a sliver of the scientific credibility it is plainly never going to have.

However, it’s Dawkins’ opening move in The God Delusion that I want to focus on to begin with. Within the space of 20 or so pages, Dawkins dismisses all ethical and allegorical reading of religious texts as unworthy of consideration in any real debate about God; like the animism of pre-historical peoples or the polytheism of the Greeks, liberal interpretations of religion don’t qualify as religion as such, and nor do the pantheism or the deism of America’s founding fathers (or indeed the deism of a certain C. Darwin). The sense of the numinous that many great scientists have felt – from Kepler through to Einstein and the late Stephen J Gould – doesn’t give Dawkins pause either, because it doesn’t come with a conception of a benevolent creator of the universe. In fact no form of belief that doesn't put its faith in an active personal supra-mundane God comes within the remit of the main argument of The God Delusion (though later in the book Dawkins will go on to suggest that, in promoting the idea that anything at all should be taken on faith, religious moderates are in effect “making the world safe for fundamentalism” and so amount to an almost equal blight on the face of the earth).

We already have a problem though. In fact we have several. The way Dawkins sets up his case suggests that “young earth creationism” has been at the core of Judeo-Christianity since the beginning, rather than being (what it clearly is) a vulnerable defensive structure hastily erected by militant latter-day Protestants who feel they've been pressed into a corner by powerful scientific modes of explaining the world. The wider problem though is that the further you get from the idea of a personal, supra-mundane God, the more you feel Richard Dawkins’ detested “God hypothesis” and his prosecution of the purveyors of a “God delusion” are simply irrelevant to the experiences of most religious folk past or present, East or West. Dawkins doesn’t seem to know much about Hinduism or Buddhism or Confucianism or, say, the vast intricate patchwork of Aboriginal Australian spirituality. But what's worse, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. About some strands of Christianity he has approximate first-hand experience, supplemented with some haphazard general reading and lots of horror stories from the American boondocks. But this passes over into more or less total ignorance when it comes to most other forms of religion belief. The result is that his claim to be making a case against all religion looks seriously inflated and his initial relegation of Indian and Chinese religion to the status of sub-religious “philosophies of life” a tad too convenient.

Religion, I’m arguing, is a target that is much more complex and protean than Dawkins would have us believe; because he brushes the complexity aside, he can hardly claim to be taking a fair – let alone scientific – view of the object of his analysis. Thus, for instance, Dawkins seems never to have heard of the social science of religion or any of its basic conceptual distinctions - which in any case only come into view once you get a cross-cultural picture of multiple religious traditions and their development down the ages. Thus, Buddhism (one certainly doesn’t hear in The God Delusion) was in its early days an explicitly atheist religion and its founder an exemplary rather than an emissary prophet, i.e. a figure who openly disavowed that he’d been sent by a supramundane god to change the way human beings led their lives. Confucianism too was largely agnostic - one of its founding propositions is that we should honour the gods and the demons (demons too apparently), but keep them at a distance.

What I’m suggesting is this: if informed scientific reflection is what you’re on about, there is no reason not to grant Buddhism or, say, Confucianism the status of fully-fledged religions. Both have certainly played roles in patterning culture and shaping lives in ways that are historically quite comparable to Christianity. Neither, however, sets up anything like the Christian dichotomy between a benevolent creator-God and his flawed creation. Thus, the first question Richard Dawkins has to squarely face is – how do so many widely different conceptions of God go missing in a book that is intended as a critique of all religion? However, it isn’t just the diversity of religious belief but crucially the diversity of ways of conceptualising religious belief that Dawkins refuses to take up into his argument; and as The God Delusion proceeds, it becomes clear why this is so. Religion has to be made to dissolve into a shapeless mass made up of the ugliest features of contemporary Christian fundamentalism because if religion is taken to be one basic thing that speaks to one basic set of human instincts, then it can be accounted for using the reductive Darwinian tools Dawkins has spent a life-time in sharpening. If in other words “the religion thing” is basically a single, well-defined phenomenon which can be explained ultimately, as we’ll go on to see, as a psychological by-product of our prehistoric genetic inheritance; and if the spread of religious beliefs within historical cultures can be accounted for as a sort of quasi-evolution - if religion has survived and thrived because of the self-replication of quasi-genetic religious "memes", as Dawkins wants to suggest – then perhaps the whole show can be knocked on the head by exposing the psychological by-products to the blowtorch of rational argument. Hopping out the blowtorch and giving a vigorous Darwinian flaming to the logical errors of the religious mind becomes the most promising strategy to inhibit religious self-reproduction in the metaphoric or not so metaphoric Darwinian playground that is the cultural life of humankind.

Admittedly, it's a strategy that has been tried before in various forms. Ever since the Enlightenment, thinkers inspired by science have invoked logic or empirical fact (or both) in their efforts to knock religion on the head. It's also true that Darwinism seems particularly well suited to the task; for there is no denying that it gives a convincing account of our evolution from less sophisticated life forms and in so doing seems to dispense with the Christian story of a Creator God, as well as the various assumptions about human beings moral/metaphysical specialness that are embedded in that story. However that again hardly means Darwinism can be used to take any non-empirical religious claim about the nature of the universe to task in exactly the same spirit.

If radical disbelief in all gods and all forms of religion is not an unavoidable consequence of any core Darwinian set of ideas, then how has Darwinism come to be used as an intellectual stick with which to administer a beating to contemporary religious believers of all persuasions? My two initial suggestions would be that neo-Darwinism functions as a sort of cultural defence-mechanism of its own - a defence, specifically, against the insane role that well-funded religious bigots play in the public life of that once great nation located south of the Canadian and north of the Mexican border. A second explanation would seem to lie in the specific ideological fervour of the Dawkins counter-lobby, for the notion that religion and science can co-exist, either in some sort of Enlightened attitude of respect or at least in mutual indifference, is anathema to Dawkins. Both he and his associates appear to detect an exasperating hostility to science in the presence of any sort of religion in society.

What is going on with Dawkins himself is maybe a case of staring so long into an abyss that after a while the abyss itself starts to stare back into you. In confronting the whole issue of God, Dawkins, you might say, doesn’t realise that he has an abyss in front of him which is staring back up at him. Instead he carries on like a man who’s quivering with disbelief at a religious rubber chicken that the contemporary culture-world keeps on serving him in lieu of a proper intellectual meal. But sure enough, I think, the abyss is staring; the various ungodly screeches we hear from the author of The God Delusion are symptoms of a mind on the edge. In straight terms, you could say that for Dawkins “God” is a problem that simply has no depth. What “God” names for Dawkins is, in conventional Enlightenment terms, a series of dangerous but nonetheless demonstrable errors. In the absence of any methodological hesitation about how to treat God as an object of enquiry – likewise in the absence of any doubt about how to interpret the pronouncements of contemporary or historical religious believers – Dawkins assumes that the only way to come to grips with religion is to take God as a quasi-physical entity whose existence he ought to be able to verify using time-honoured scientific notions of cause and effect. If God existed then we’d be able to detect physical traces of his presence in the world, and then go on to make credible empirical claims about him, using the apparatus of scientific theory-building: this is the God hypothesis. Given that the most minimal claims about his physical presence in the world fall to the ground, then we're entitled to conclude that believers are suffering from a sort of mental disorder: this is the God delusion.

This brings me to some of the more complicated reasons why radical atheism has become yet another blunt weapon for fighting yet another modern-day culture war. Dawkins beloved scientific specialty, biology, is one of the last redoubts of totalising methodological reductionism in science and in this respect occupies an exceptional position within a scientific firmament that is a little less starry than it was not so many decades ago. Even physics, in the passage from its classical Newtonian phase to its post-classical quantum phase, has had to moderate some of its earlier ambitions, as research into sub-atomic particles has demanded ever more paradoxical interpretations of basic physical law – and as the goal of theoretically comprehending all phenomena in purely physical terms has proved more and more elusive. [1] No such intellectual modesty need trouble biologists. Since WW2 classical reductionist methodology has come into its own among the biological sciences - starting with the discovery of the basic mechanism of biological inheritance (DNA) in 1953 and culminating in the grand project to map the human genome in more recent times. Little wonder, then, that Dawkins is enthusiastic about busting God down to basics and showing those theists who’s who the old-fashioned scientific way. Little wonder too that the gleam of one of the Nineteenth Century's dream-projects – that of a scientific physiology of culture – shines brightly in his eyes.

Dawkins' case against religion re-capitulates the Enlightenment’s basic case – or one side of it – as if the blossoms of that great Eighteenth Century intellectual movement were still in first flower. The rough case was that belief in God is a product of psychological need, together with a certain willingness on the part of human beings to let themselves be cowed by priestly authority; that the Bible, far from being a work of ethical instruction or a storehouse of tradition, is an object of superstitious reverence that ought to be judged by the standards of demonstrative empirical truth. Dawkins' terms are somewhat different but point is still the same: the only way to read the Bible, and the various pronouncements of people who take their inspiration from it, are by the light of scientific reason, or in New Atheism's case, by the light of evolutionary science, with all its consciousness-raising power.

Dawkins, however, doesn’t seem to fully appreciate how much the world has changed between the Enlightenment and now. His inability to see himself and his intellectual hopes in critical historical perspective means that he doesn’t see that between AD 1800 and ACE 2010 science has essentially been victorious in its cultural struggle with religion – not quite in the sense that the illuminati of the Eighteenth Century might have hoped, but certainly in the sense that science, and science alone, nowadays defines what nature is; since the Enlightenment, the Church’s power to lay down a vision of nature as Divine Creation in the Western World has been in steady, some would say terminal, decline.

What’s more, the victory of science over religion has been bedded down as a dynamic social process of continuous revolution; decade by decade, almost week to week, science and technology work in concert to radically change the conditions of everyday life. This raises another complicated problem of social and historical meaning, one that Dawkins again overlooks because of the one-dimensional nature of his terms of engagement. Could it be that the very way the victory of science over religion has been bedded down has given people a bit of a need for old-style religion all over again? In vastly expanding our capacity to wage war, in giving us the means with which to consume the natural resources of our planet to vast excess and in subtly suggesting that every second field of human endeavour ought to be subject to rational criteria deriving from science and its offshoots, hasn't science been giving us things to worry about on an ever-larger scale? Of course the systematic pursuit of scientific knowledge is not directly to blame for the cultural and environmental destructiveness that recent human history have brought with them; and certainly no individual scientist need feel responsible for the wider destructive consequences of the techno-scientific revolution: the reliance on experts, the displacement of non-technical forms of knowledge, people's overwhelming sense of powerlessness in the face of the increasing systematic complexity of the modern world. If however discovering the sources of religious belief is your business, and critical self-reflection is part of the business plan, then a bit of attention to those sorts of broad facts about social modernity is indispensable. Science and its techno-industrial application has played a considerable part in creating a world in which people fall back rather gladly into the arms of religion - a fact that a self-reflexive scientific thinker ought to be alert to.

Before turning to the central claims of The God Delusion, let me do a little thinking on Dawkins' behalf on this score. If I had to account for the continuing attraction of religion in one paragraph or less, I wouldn’t point so much to the limits of scientific advancement, but to the fact that religions, including the Christian religion, have established themselves as a bit of a refuge against some of the forces in the world that have been advancing for a long time and have caused a lot of people severe anxiety in the process. - Much as you might get most people in countries like Australia to agree in questionnaires to the proposition that they "believe what science says" (whatever that means), our society just doesn't seem capable of acquainting large enough numbers of people with the complex bodies of bio-geo-physical fact that fly in the face of more literalist interpretations of the Bible; perhaps more significant still, as the years go by, it seems to get ever further away from giving everyone the opportunity to live without large-scale grief - precisely the sort of misery that religion can seem like a valid response to. On the other hand, there's probably a general perception that most religious folk take the notion of charity and social cohesion a little more seriously than most non-religious folk and much more seriously than they are taken by the dominant institution of the contemporary world - the market economy. Religion, in very broad terms, probably isn't going backwards because there's a bit of a sense that it functions as a counterweight to the at times pitiless spirit of commercialism governing the social systems by which we supply our ever-multiplying material needs. If religion isn't going backwards, I'd say, that has little to do with the way people continue to put themselves down by habit as "of Christian background" or say they believe in some sort of afterlife (which they strangely seem to do just as often as they say they believe in science); what it has to do with is the not unjustifiable perception that religion is a viable path of self-restraint in a world dominated by grossly excessive consumption. The fewer needs you have the happier you are, they say. Well, in the crack-brained rooting-tooting-cussing-gorging times we live in, when maxing out your credit card is something to group-text your friends about, and when your patriotic duty in an economic crisis is to get out there and shop, religion is seen as a powerful motivation to slough off superfluous needs and ignore various palpably insane social imperatives.

Of course, the fact that religion functions as a powerful motivator doesn’t give any particular set of religious ideas a claim to truth. However, it should come into careful consideration when we're thinking about the origins and continued existence of religion as a meaningful institution of human culture. And it’s precisely those two things – the origins and continued existence of religion as a meaningful institution of human culture – that Richard Dawkins, because of his inability to think thinking, can’t give any sort of nuanced scientific account of.

*

Even if you’re wary about having your consciousness raised by the good comrades of the biology faculty, the way Dawkins goes to town against the Intelligent Design idea in The God Delusion nonetheless conveys the simplicity and power of Darwinism and its methods. If it weren’t for the suggestion that the proponents of Intelligent Design are a pack of mendacious dunces, the middle stretch of Dawkins' book might almost be a popular-scientific tour de force [2].
It would be unfair not to review the one moment of the book that really does succeed in doing what it sets out to do - so here goes. Dawkins’ specific bone of contention in Chapter 4 of The God Delusion is what goes by the name of “irreducible complexity” – a term used by Intelligent Design theorists, including a small number with bona fides scientific credentials, to talk about complex biological traits whose origins are at first sight very hard to explain in terms of step-wise Darwinian “descent with modification”. (For those of you who haven’t read The God Delusion, you can intuitively grasp the problem by thinking, say, about animals' eyes or birds' wings. The theory of natural selection strongly suggests that numerous steps would’ve been involved in the evolution of such structures. But this raises a problem. Given that many of the steps would’ve conferred little or no adaptive advantage - given that they wouldn't seem to have helped prehistoric creatures survive any better and thus pass on their genes - how can such structures have evolved? Could their evolution be the work of a conscious being trying to intentionally create a certain sort of organ/ism, perhaps even a being that created them out of nothing in one hit?

The proponents of Intelligent Design, who obviously want to answer yes to the above question, seem to have lost the argument as far as eyes and wings go; as Dawkins points out, there are numerous types of eye of numerous degrees of complexity in existence in the animal kingdom – everything from flatworms’ crude devices for registering light-and-shade to the advanced visual equipment of eagles and eagle-eyed fighter pilots – and these suggest an evolutionary pathway – indeed numerous evolutionary pathways – that species might have traversed in the course of millennia in evolving what might look like irreducibly complicated biological structures. Though primitive eyes and wings clearly don't confer the adaptive advantages of more sophisticated eyes and wings, they nonetheless confer adaptive advantages of sorts.

Eyes and wings aside though, there are isolated examples of biological structures that defy easy explanation in evolutionary terms - and this is where the debate between Dawkins and the Intelligent Design crowd hots up. A particular favourite of hardline creationists is the flagellar propulsion of common bacteria (- seemingly an unfortunate little beastie for God to grace with signs of his creative intelligence, though let that pass). The bacterium's equipment for moving about, Dawkins tells us in Chapter 4, is a prodigy of nature, driving “the only known example, outside human technology, of a freely rotating axle.” So the question is: how could a biological mechanism structurally resembling the outboard motor of a speedboat, needing a co-ordinated array of ten fixed and moving parts to perform any sort of useful function, have come into existence without outside help? I won't go into the detail. But let me say that Chapter 4 of The God Delusion contains the convincing answer. Part of the reason it’s convincing is that Dawkins writes with lavish enthusiasm, and considerable talent, about the sort of biological complexity which creationists like to think takes us right up to the threshold of divine creation as a physical act. When he isn’t busy wishing his adversaries to oblivion, Dawkins is at his best. As long as he sticks to explaining the way things around us work from an evolutionary point of view, he’s the ideal high school science teacher - the one who doesn’t mumble his explanations into his beard.

Having successfully prosecuted the case against Intelligent Design - Dawkins moves on to explaining where he thinks religion comes from. If human beings’ sense of God isn’t actually God-given, then it still needs to find its way into the world somehow and Dawkins rightly thinks he needs to tell us how. This is the point at which the theory of natural selection does double service; Chapter 5 of the The God Delusion puts together the ideas of sympathetic biologists and philosophers into an overarching theory of the evolutionary origins of religion itself.

To begin with, we get the basic theoretical model – what Dawkins calls the scientific by-product theory, which considers religion - again on the presupposition that it is a single, well-defined phenomenon with an identifiable essence – as a sort of spin-off of other human capacities with primary adaptive functions such as fear, pain, language-use and consciousness. It's a simple, effective idea which again Dawkins explains well. Fear, pain, language-use and consciousness all helped our pre-historic ancestors to survive down the generations, so the genetic material that provided the physiological building blocks for them tended to be passed on. However over time they also came together to form an unusual amalgam - religion - which picks up on our terror in the face of the natural environment, our propensity to avoid pain, as well as our awareness of ourselves as agents and our ability to do things with words, and brings them together to form a set of delusional ideas which also get passed on, quasi-instinctively, from generation to generation.

Over-writing the psychological by-product theory is a different thesis, also with its roots in recent evolutionary psychology - the idea that religion might be a more specific - presumably in evolutionary terms a much later - psychological by-product, this time of the suggestibility of children; as Dawkins chooses to put it, religion might be a kind of side-effect of the way children’s brains can be “programmed”. - Simplifying a little, the idea is that religion evolved because it conferred a selective advantage on groups of early human beings whose offspring took on face value what their parents told them – not just about not straying too far from the pack, but also, say, about mysterious spirit worlds as well. The tight control hominid parents exercised over their offspring promoted primitive social cohesion and primitive social cohesion promoted survival. Because primitive ideas about other-worldly matters were part of the control process, they too continued to be passed on down the generations. QED.

Next comes an ingenious suggestion from Dawkins’ friend Daniel Dennett – that religion could be a sort of over-development of a certain type of pragmatic life-stance which early humans may have adopted in order to survive in hostile environments with the help of their burgeoning brain capacities. Dennett calls it the intentional stance and contrasts it with a so-called design stance and a physical stance. When we adopt the intentional stance, we view things in the world around us as if they were endowed with something like human agency (i.e. intentions), which in the case of primitive religion might mean attributing agency, for instance, to rocks and trees and places, to the dead or to the world as a whole. On this picture, religion gets started, and continues to thrive, because it reflects, or perhaps even heightens, the (scientifically false but biologically useful) idea that all sorts of things in the world around us can intentionally harm us. Showing caution in the face of things with harmful intentions, or indeed a certain amount of measured aggression towards them, is a good way of surviving and thus of passing on your genes.

Or could our seemingly ingrained capacity for religious belief even be a side-effect of the human capacity for love? At last, it looks as if Dawkins might be about to tell us how the human hankering for religion is culturally patterned. Love, either in the form of eros or agape, seems capable of being made to flow into so many different channels, sublimated, transferred, turned against itself - stereotyped and psychologically patterned in ways that are surely not irrelevant to the genesis of religious belief. For Dawkins though, the only conclusion sanctioned by the work of hard science is that there is potentially a hefty “survival bonus” to be gained from some forms of irrational emotional attachment to higher powers. Believing that you or your tribe are uniquely blessed with the gods' favour or uniquely tasked with showing love and devotion to them would appear to provide a very strong motivation to survive and strive. (Though the simpler term for the sort of self-love that accrues to people who believe they have special connections to higher powers would be narcissism, the opportunity to take a more psychological approach to his problem here is something Dawkins passes up. Again, he misses an opportunity to add a handy extra dimension to this case.)

As suggestive as each of these part-theories are though, by this stage they do seem to have multiplied a little worryingly. Unlike the relatively well-defined problem how the bacterium evolved its ten-dimensional outboard motor, each sends Dawkins off down a different speculative pathway. And as Chapter 5 of The God Delusion moves from a relatively exacting functional account of the evolution of wings, eyes and bacterial flagella to a rather less exacting functional account of religion, it falls into a habit much on display in evolutionary psychology – that of vaguely affirming that some aspect of the human mind or human behaviour (in this case religious belief) exists because it may well have been useful, and putting all questions of details and proof to one side.

Or, to put the point more sharply – the arguments about the origins of religion offered by Dawkins in a way seem almost as speculative as a lot of theological views about the nature and operation of the Christian godhead. In neither case are the core issues open to direct empirical investigation, as they are in the case of eyes or flagella; unfortunately for Dawkins, rigorously running the film of evolutionary development backwards using the differential equations of mathematical genetics, as biologists are often able to do in order to recover past gene pools, is not even remotely possible. It would need to be to specify the unique set of conditions under which primitive religion might have developed.

The evolutionary account of religion offered in Chapter 5 of Dawkins’ book tells us that prehistoric religion could have enhanced the survival chances of primitive human beings – that religion can be looked at as a misfiring of animal instinct in a creature with a brain of a particular size, possessing language and faced with certain natural hazards. But the step from potent suggestion to rigorous theory, which involves showing how primitive religion worked at the molecular or mechanical level of explanation, is enormous and the difficulties involved in retracing the links in the causal chain (as opposed to pointing approximately to widely spaced segments of the chain) shouldn't be fudged. In short, there is no reason to think on the basis of what Dawkins gives us in The God Delusion that he or any of his colleagues in evolutionary psychology have retraced the links using anything but a series of loose analogies - metaphors which point with a certain anti-poetic poetry firstly at the brain as a “collection of organs (or ‘modules’) for dealing with a set of specialist data-processing needs” and secondly at religion as a quasi-adaptation of that brain to a rough set of environmental challenges.

Atop the dizzingly high structure of semi-conceptual, semi-metaphoric explanations, Dawkins places another analogical thought-figure: the meme. In fact, he hastily whips up a “memetic” theory of religion: where straight, old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection explains how the brain develops what he calls a “hardware platform” for running delusionary religious programs, it’s "memetic" natural selection that supplies “low-level system software”. Once we've understood the "systems software", an over-arching theory of "memetic natural selection" promises to explain which religious ideas (i.e. delusions) went on to survive and proliferate. Religion, in fact, looks as if it can be explained away without much reference to its specific content at all.

The general drift of this additional bit of theory will be clear to anyone who has followed debates about memes down the decades. (Dawkins himself coined the notion in the 1970’s [3]). Memes in essence are the basic unit of natural selection in cultural matters, in the same way genes are the basic unit of natural selection at the level of long-term biological descent with modification. [4] As with genes in a gene pool, the religious memes that prevail in the quasi-organic environment of human culture will be the ones that provide their human hosts with advantages in competitive cultural environments and are hence good at getting themselves copied. Dawkins is quick to add that the analogy between meme theory and gene theory is only partial, for religious ideas, unlike genes, do undeniably bear some marks of intelligent design. The way religious memes come into existence and spread is, at least partly, attributable to the conscious intentions of their creators; so having, say, an intelligent perception of what is likely to speak to the minds of religiously needy multitudes might, in this case, be working alongside the otherwise impersonal memetic mechanisms of cultural variation, mutation, competition and inheritance to further the survival of this or that meme.

Dawkins goes to some lengths to defend the notion of memetic selection against its detractors among his fellow biologists. One of the main criticisms from scientists who don't subscribe to Dawkins’ reductionist agenda has tended to be that in the cultural realm there's no memetic code-script analogous to DNA to ensure exact replication as memes are passed from one generation of religious believers to the next. Dawkins believes he has the objection covered; on his theory, mechanically exact reproduction of memes is not required for the successful transmission of cultural representations like religious beliefs from one brain to the next. However, the main challenge to the memetic theory of religion, which comes from outside biology, goes unanswered; it's that Dawkins' abstract genetic view of religion, based as it is on a theory of memetic culture-molecules, just doesn’t have enough to say about the way religions act as causes within culture to explain any of the basic facts of religious development. What enables particular sets of religious ideas to flourish? How do different religions measure off against each other? How do they die out? In a sense this is the exact point of his argument where Dawkins mistakes the abyss for the rubber-chicken – Dawkins thinks he doesn't need to take into scientific account the specifically human character of the religious phenomena he purports to be studying – the way religious beliefs shape people, groups, institutions and whole societies and interact with other dimensions of culture like art and politics. It's also the point where it becomes clear just how gravely he fails to appreciate the difference between the concrete specificity required to give proper causal accounts of socially complex phenomena and the abstract universality of the general laws of natural science; while it's the latter type of general laws he wants to develop using the notion of memes, it's the concrete specificity characteristic of social science that he would need to give his account any real explanatory power. The result in practical terms is that in Chapter 5 and 6 readers of The God Delusion are presented with a fairly flat story which doesn’t begin to explain how the specific content of different religious beliefs or the meaningful relations they establish make a difference to the history of humanity as a religiously inflected ebb and flow. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of the history of religion or the history of culture is unlikely to be satisfied with these crucial, non-polemical moments of the book. What they seem to be presenting are a series of just-so stories which don't become any more credible (or any more scientific) because they take the theory of natural selection as their point of departure.

The point is not that Dawkins' account of religion in terms of memetic culture-molecules is in any straightforward sense wrong, it just doesn't have very much to say causally speaking. All in all, Dawkins seems to be motivated by a naive faith that any proper scientific explanation of religion would reproduce the very pattern of Darwinism's successes in explaining genetic inheritance and change. [5] The methodological reflex that has him in its grip is the assumption that Darwinism provides not just one paradigmatic example of good scientific explanation, but the one true model of any good scientific explanation.

And in case that sounds like it rules out taking religion in anything but its own terms, it is important to be clear here - it is quite possible to think that the theory of natural selection accounts for some of the pre-conditions of religious belief - in a speculative spirit, but no less powerfully for that. My argument is that religious belief can only be accounted for in the full sense with the help of a broad multi-causal picture that draws on various explanatory patterns, not just on the possibilities suggested by evolutionary science; understanding the events of cultural history depends, in particular, on understanding the way the meanings and values that human beings attribute to events play a vital role in causally determining what happens. Indeed, meaning and value play such a vital role that any explanation of the events of cultural history which ignores them is bound to be a deficient explanation.

To use an over-used term that in this case happens to be entirely appropriate - any explanation of the origins of religion that bypasses the level of meaning and value is bound to be reductive. Dawkins’ problem is that he is looking for one type of cause where only multiple, partially efficacious types of causation will do. That dooms the middle portion of The God Delusion to partiality and narrowness. And in a way explains the clown-show that the book degenerates into towards the end.

*

Chapter 7 is about the point at which The God Delusion moves from mildly informative boosting of scientific theory to chaotic atheist screed. The catalogue of Biblical nastiness begins in earnest, as do the front-line stories of gun-toting, gay-bashing, white-supremicist religious crazies, whom Dawkins clearly takes to be quite characteristic of Religion On The Whole. The rhetorical piece de resistance has already come at the top of Chapter 2:

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Chapters 7 and 8 then proceed to re-tell the horror stories unleashed by this Brett Easton Ellis figure at greater length – doing so at times in a breathless frat party tone of gleeful sarcasm. Anyone (male) who went through school Religious Education and puberty together will probably recall the excitement of flipping discovering the book of the Bible called "Song of Songs" and having himself a grand time with all the curves and cleavage. Dawkins, in a similar vein, comes out with this sort of jibe about The Ten Commandments:

"To my naïve eyes, “Thou shalt have no other gods but me” would seem an easy enough commandment to keep: a doddle, one might think, compared with “Thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s wife”. Or her ass. (Or her ox.) Yet throughout the Old Testament, with the same predictable regularity as in bedroom farce, God had only to turn his back for a moment and the Children of Israel would be off and at it with Baal, or some trollop of a graven image. . ."

What a wag Richard is.

But what a nag too. By this stage of The God Delusion Dawkins' preferred debating strategy is to translate the basic terms of Biblical narrative into contemporary idiom and use the latter as an offensive weapon. Biblical Canaan becomes a proto-National Socialist form of Lebensraum. The brutalities of battle detailed in the Book of Joshua become crimes against humanity, while punishments inflicted for breaches of Levitical ethical code in the surrounding Biblical text turn into scenes from commercial tv news; they start Dawkins huffing and puffing like Andrew Bolt:

"What shocks me today about such stories is not that they really happened. They probably didn’t. What makes my jaw drop is that people today should base their lives on such an appalling role model as Yahwe – and, even worse, that they should bossily try to force the same evil monster (whether fact or fiction) on the rest of us."

On the question of “role models”, Dawkins seems plainly to be in the grip of a category error – indeed one he shares with the worst of the fundamentalists. In short, it ought to be obvious to anyone (anyone capable of taking the Bible non-literally as a composite construction with numerous textual strata) that the horror stories in the Old Testament belong to a mythologised history; the tales of Abraham’s chequered progress in the Book of Genesis are not intended to preach morality in any simple sense and if Dawkins had been prepared to think about his topic with moderate scientific sophistication then he wouldn't take fundamentalist interpretations of the Old Testament as the only obvious way to read the Bible. Similarly, the way Dawkins plays up the vengeful, puritanical character of Yahwe ignores two things scholars of the Bible have known for a long time: (a) that the Old Testament contains multiple partially indicated conceptions of the nature of the Biblical God and his relationship to human beings and (b) that these partial conceptions enter into complex combination, at times even into opposition to each other, at various points in the text. Simplifying considerably, we can point to two poles between which the Yahwe conception of the Old Testament moves: on the one hand, there's the historically ancient conception of the warrior God with the changeable heart who is something like the God of the Israelite tribal confederacy and not dissimilar to the object of Dawkins’ scorn [5]; on the other, there's the prophets’ God of holy purity, who is much closer to being a principled ethical God of the entire universe. To point out that the Old Testament can be read as the historical document of both these conceptions of God as well as numerous intermediate conceptions ought to be superfluous in the context of an informed scientific argument about Biblical religion. Dawkins is only interested in the first conception because it’s all he needs to grind his own axe.

To readers coming to Dawkins’ work for the first time, it must surely seem strange that the author of the The God Delusion has acquired a reputation as an intelligent scientific populariser. What comes to the fore from about the half-way point of the book is a furious adversarialism, combined with a certain sort of clichéd moralising of a vaguely left-wing variety that sounds as if it might veer hard-right at any moment. The contradictory nature of New Atheism is on display in spades – above all the whole soapy, uplifting tone, which sits uncomfortably with the blazing polemics and compulsive irreligiosity. At the 300p mark Dawkins launches into a serious argument that bringing up children in any religious tradition whatsoever is a form of child abuse - a deliberately overblown he backs up with the tale of a Jewish-Italian baby secretly baptized by a Catholic maid then removed from the family home with the connivance of the Vatican a few years later. Yet, as wretched as the story sounds, you still feel Dawkins' primary aim in re-telling it is to score points against the God-bothering enemy. No sooner has he tabled the case of little Edgardo than he's reading out a charge-sheet detailing the intellectual and emotional criminality of all forms of religious baptism. It turns out to be a very long charge-sheet indeed. Once he’s done with the indictment, he immediately foregrounds himself and his own sense of moral pathos:

"As for me, I think only of poor little Edgardo – unwittingly born into a world dominated by the religious mind, hapless in the crossfire, all but orphaned in an act of well-meaning but, to a young child, shattering cruelty."

By this stage, Dawkins is well and truly in the land of tabloid opinion pieces, tritely bandying about details of abuses and outrages - raging at the polemical enemy without noticing that in doing so he’s jumping up and down on victims’ graves. Poor little Edgardo, destined to be a religio-political football of future centuries! Doubly poor Richard Dawkins, compelled to boil and re-boil the meaty religious scepticism of the Enlightenment until it is ready to be snap-frozen and distributed to the spiritual supermarkets of the entire world! Infinitely poor world, trapped in the nightmare of its ever-burgeoning op-ed piece of an existence!

Or take this passage from Dawkins’ flat irritable onslaught against Nigel McQuoid – the brain ("brain"?!?) behind the teaching of creation science in fundamentalist outliers of the British education system:

"The level of McQuoid’s scientific understanding can be judged from his belief that the world is less than ten thousand years old, and also from the following quotation: ‘But to think that we just evolved from a bang, that we used to be monkeys, that seems unbelievable when you look at the complexity of the human body. . . If you tell children there is no purpose in life – that they are just a chemical mutation – that doesn’t build self-esteem.’. . . No scientist has ever suggested that a child is a “chemical mutation”. The use of the phrase in such a context is illiterate nonsense, on a par with the declarations of “Bishop” Wayne Malcolm, leader of the Christian Life City church in Hackney, east London, who, according to the Guardian of 18 April 2006, 'disputes the scientific evidence for evolution'. Malcolm’s understanding of the evidence he disputes can be gauged from his statement that 'There is clearly an absence of . . . in the fossil record for intermediate levels of development. If a frog turned into a monkey, shouldn’t you have lots of fronkies?'"

And there it is – Richard Dawkins’ specific lack of intellectual poise in a nutshell: he just can’t help trying to refute every nutter in sight and, what’s worse, doing so in a horrible snippy tone as if to say “Look at these people. They don’t even understand basic logical syllogisms. . .” In every sentence of these later chapters of The God Delusion you can virtually feel Dawkins wincing with mental acuity – or wincing at his opponents’ lack of it. In none of them does he display the most basic of the intellectual virtues which would help turn his dispute with the faithful into something more than a nasty boring pillow-fight: the ability to imagine the best version of his opponents' view of the world. Having watched Dawkins pursue the weirdly named McQuoid into half a dozen argumentative potholes in as many paragraphs, you half expect Dawkins to try refuting him on the subject of fronkies too. . .

What the later chapters of Dawkins’ book set the terms for in short is an ideological debate – a dispute the main parties to which can never admit any of the flaws in their own positions. As with all ideological debates, the fight is everything, coming across effectively is the criterion of all speech, baiting the enemy and enjoying those warm gusts of sympathy from supporters are major preoccupations, as is the ever-fresh possibility of public support for your windy rhetorical stances. And so it is that New Atheism is to be found widely imitating the tactics of its adversaries - whose missionary activities, above all in the US, have taken up all the trashy techniques of commercial self-promotion that contemporary American society can think up – from graveyard tv spots to professional lobbying to multi-million dollar spirals of vexatious litigation. So it is that Dawkins’ book has emerged as the manifesto of one of those strange quasi-social movements that make use of all the paramilitary equipment of peace-time war supplied by modern advertising: flip through to the end of The God Delusion and you’ll find the help-lines, flip through to the lifestyle section of your local broadsheet and you might well find a full-page ad or a full-page interview.

Of course, the most prosaic feature of all ideological debate is that, if you’re not actively barracking for either side then – everyone who is seems as bad as everyone else. In this case, the way science in its evangelical Darwinian guise takes the form of commercial publicity seems almost as dubious as the way religion in its creationist guise tries to take on the form of science.

And the resemblances don't just end there. Like his adversaries, who reject the general climate of liberal permissiveness they take to define contemporary society, Dawkins takes himself to be a renegade against contemporary society, with its all too indulgent attitude to religious delusion. Like them too, his obsessive mentality condemns him to live in a sort of eternal present that is the human reality of total warfare.

The ways of ideology are indeed strange. And what they illustrate most clearly of all in the Dawkins case is how two parties to a controversy can believe in pretty much opposite things, but in a strangely similar mode, leaving everyone else wanting to run for the hills.

*

To get the whole controversy in perspective, it’s useful to remind yourself of some of the different arguments that have emerged in the history of atheism – whose long history is itself something of a counterbalance to the impression given in The God Delusion that the arguments between Christianity and its opponents have never amounted to much more than a nasty boring pillow fight. The most important thing to remember here is that anti-religious scepticism has been present in most developed cultures in history. And I want to finish up today's presentation by going through what I think are some of its more memorable moments.

One of the oldest recorded examples of anti-religious scepticism is Archilochaus the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, about whom all we know is that he found the Homeric gods “funny” and set about trying to improve on the myths that told of their various doings. A later Greek philosopher, Xenophanes, put his case more analytically: non-Greeks imagine the gods in their own non-Greek image, and if horses had gods then they would almost certainly look like a species of super-horse; gods which in any way resemble their human worshippers are more likely to be a reflection of their human worshippers' image of themselves rather than a true manifestation of any sort of transcendent reality.

Several centuries before Christianity had even begun, Epicurus (341 - 270 BC), had already formulated this magnificently spare critique of its maximal conception of a good, all-powerful God:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is not good.
Is he both able and willing?
Then where does evil come from?
Is he neither able not willing?
Then why call him God?

Or, skipping forward in time, it's hard to go past Kant, the giant of the Enlightenment who provided the decisive refutation of the ontological argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument in a nutshell says that God by definition must possess all the perfections; that reality is a rather important perfection; that therefore God must be real: God exists; the Kantian answer to which is that “existence is not a predicate" - existence is wrongly conceived of in the ontological argument as another attribute (or “predicate”) of God comparable, say, to His omnipotence.

Things get more complicated the further you get into Kant's monumental Critique of Pure Reason. Along with the notions of immortality and the soul, the concept of God turns out for Kant to be antinomian in nature - a necessary illusion of a human faculty that less subtle atheists would hardly have expected Him to derive from: the faculty of reason itself. God if you like for Kant is the maximum point of our attempts to explain the world. He is not real in the sense of being an "object of possible experience", He is something that human reason posits as a sort of total condition of the possibility of all experience, the original cause and ongoing support of the world. Far from being a mere remnant of medieval superstition, or a side-effect of primary genetic adaptions, God is a too rational assumption; critical reason (Kant's favourite type of Reason) tries to set limits to this predictable extravagance of our rational minds, not wipe it from the face of the earth.

Or, alternatively, we could return to Nietzsche - whose views about Christianity are just as strong as Dawkins' and whose writings also involve a certain amount of rhetorical overkill, though of a rather grander variety than what we get in The God Delusion:

"That, as an “immortal soul”, everybody is equal to everybody else, that in the totality of beings the “salvation” of every single one is permitted to claim to be of everlasting moment, that little bigots and three-quarters madmen are permitted to imagine that for their sakes the laws of nature are continually being broken – such a raising of every sort of egoism to infinity, to impudence, cannot be branded with sufficient contempt." [6]

It’s worth noting that, as explosive as Nietzsche’s anti-Christianity can be, passages like the one I've just quoted come in the middle of an historically informed argument about Christianity and its origins: Nietzsche’s thesis in The Anti-Christ (1888) is that what came to be called Christianity was the result of a radical re-interpretation of Jesus’ sense that active love must be the full criterion of religious piety; on the Nietzschean picture, Jesus' vision of love was misused by St Paul in the fabrication of a theological faith in Christ as the resurrected Son of God. Jesus in no way claims to be the Son of God or demands that others worship him; Paul, on Nietzsche's picture, makes exactly that claim on Jesus's behalf and in doing so practically inverts the demand the historical Jesus may indeed have made on his fellow human beings: to practice charity and show mercy to everyone, irrespective of their colour or creed.

The details of Nietzsche's anti-Christianity to one side though: the reason Nietzsche is the sort of thinker that neither theists nor atheists can really get around is because, for all his withering attack-pieces, he is just as willing to think against atheism as he is to think against each and every religious interpretation of the world. This isn’t only because he can see into the abysmal depths of the God-problem, nor just because he has a way of compressing the cultural, historical and very live emotional aspects of religious belief into an impassioned series of philosophical reflections. Nor is it because he refuses, unlike Dawkins, to collapse his discussion into a series of debater-ish pros and contras. Rather, it is because the anxieties he has about the consequences of the loss of religion are precisely as strong as his conviction that that loss is inevitable. Nietzsche, in other words, sees the tragedy that any large-scale loss of religious feeling involves and in the case of Christianity he lives that tragedy out in the text of his own philosophy. The theme of so much of his later thought is the tragedy of a general cultural loss of pathos that follows from a widespread loss of belief – a tragedy that is likely to leave the average denizen of the post-religious culture-world neither a troglodytic fundamentalist nor an embittered anti-fundamentalist but an insipid hedonist conformist – one of the “last men” Nietzsche pictures hopping around in a semi-satisfied daze, immune to any of life’s deeper problems, be they religious or scientific or philosophical.

Like Dawkins, Nietzsche thinks that Darwinism is true, but he doesn’t think of it as therefore worthy of evangelical proclamation. Nietzsche thinks Darwinism is (as he put it) true but deadly – deadly, namely, to at least one major sense of the seriousness of life; Christianity in particular, Nietzsche sees, has encouraged human beings to think of life as a moral-metaphysical drama, but with the playscript gone temporal trivia threatens to rob of our old sense that life has any substantial purpose. Above all though, Nietzsche is not subject to the confusion of taking the God of the Christian Bible as an hypothesis, let alone a scientifically testable hypothesis; he considers it, in my view rightly, as an interpretative posit [7] – an existential presupposition that cannot be evaluated according to any absolute scientific measure - a presupposition, moreover, that possesses a meaning-giving function that is never entirely separate from its truth-content and has many positive points of connection with the scientific mode of interpreting the world.

In Nietzsche’s philosophy Kant's critique of religious concepts is renewed, but at the same time given a paradoxical and enriching turn – with a sort of counter-critique of scientific triumphalism added into the mix of the critique.

For all his anti-Christianity, Nietzsche sees that science and religion generate forms of knowledge-and-experience that don’t bear easy comparison. Science starts out from the idea that the world is at bottom nothing but a causal mechanism. Religion, on the other hand, gives us the idea that the world is a God-ordained and hence somehow a meaningfully and ethically-oriented cosmos [8]. Science doesn’t flinch at the idea that there are no mysteries, or at least no mysteries that can’t be dispelled; religion on the other hand endows the idea that human beings have limits with an ethical significance and sees responsiveness to those limits – to human finitude, to the mysterious and to the ineffable - as the touchstones of human wisdom (in their own ways, art and philosophy do so too). Richard Dawkins’ disservice to atheism is his uncritical advocacy of the narrow scientific view –that and his inability to see that the waning of religion in the West is an historically largely accomplished fact, the prime consequence of which is what has been aptly described as the disenchantment of the world.

If it’s true that history has a tendency to repeat itself first as tragedy, then as farce, then the tragedy of Enlightenment enacted in the work of Nietzsche has its farcical epilogue in Dawkins’ attempts to relegate all religion to the trashcan of anti-Darwinian superstition. However, if we’re looking for an alternative to both those positions and neither the embarrassing irrationality of creationism nor the conditional devotion of a purely ethical Christianity will do, then it is worth remembering what the world looked like before the tragedy of Enlightenment began. The last word in my presentation today goes to G.C. Lichtenberg, an Eighteenth Century professor of physics who was the subtle exponent of a scientific-yet-personal view of religion that is neither riven with tragic pathos, like Nietzsche, nor prone to bathos, like Dawkins:

"Religion is really the art of acquiring for oneself comfort and courage in affliction, and the strength to work against it, through thoughts of God and by no other means. I have known people to whom their good fortune was their God. They believed in their good fortune and their belief gave them courage. Courage gave them good fortune and good fortune gave them courage. It is a great loss for a man if he loses his faith in a wise being who directs the world. I believe this is an inevitable consequence of all study of philosophy and of nature. One does not lose belief in a God, to be sure, but it is no longer the benevolent God of our childhood; it is a being whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts, and this is not especially helpful to the helpless."

There you have it – a sort of moonlit Enlightenment view of religion which knows the necessity of the loss of faith and which takes into account both the intellectual tenuousness of a belief in a good active god and the positive emotional circularity of such belief – that efficacious loop whereby belief in God brings the world into a sort of God-given motion.

Last but not least it is this subtle, sympathetic view of religion that New Atheism excludes by taking on Richard Dawkins' ill-considered tone of self-righteous fury: the view of a scientist who is nothing less than a philosopher and nothing more than a human being, who speaks softly and without calumny of the religious viewpoint his science has compelled him to leave behind.

The Great Stage

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Pseuds Corner No 12 - Pseuds Melbourne

Friday, February 18, 2011

The God Delusion Revisited - Again

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