“You’re setting up a straw man by arguing against a naive and anthropomorphic view of `God’; if only you engaged with more sophisticated theology, you’d see that things are not so cut-and-dried.”Sean concludes:Before jumping in, I should mention that I have somewhat mixed feelings about Dawkins’s book myself. I haven’t read it very thoroughly, not because it’s not good, but for the same reason that I rarely read popular cosmology books from cover to cover: I’ve mostly seen this stuff before, and already agree with the conclusions. But Dawkins has a strategy that is very common among atheist polemicists, and with which I tend to disagree. That’s to simultaneously tackle three very different issues:
- Does God exist? Are the claims of religion true, as statements about the fundamental nature of the universe?
- Is religious belief helpful or harmful? Does it do more bad than good, or vice-versa?
- Why are people religious? Is there some evolutionary-psychological or neurological basis for why religion is so prevalent?
All of these questions are interesting. But, from where I am sitting, the last two are incredibly complicated issues about which it is very difficult to say anything definitive, at least at this point in our intellectual history. Whereas the first one is relatively simple. By mixing them up, the controversial accounts of history and psychology tend to dilute the straightforward claim that there’s every reason to disbelieve in the existence of God. When Dawkins suggests that the Troubles in Northern Ireland should be understood primarily as a religious schism between Catholics and Protestants, he sacrifices some of the credibility he may have had if he had stuck to the more straightforward issue of whether or not religion is true...
To be fair, much of Dawkins’s book does indeed take aim at a rather unsophisticated form of belief, one that holds a much more literal (and wholly implausible, not to mention deeply distasteful) notion of what God means. That’s not a completely unwarranted focus, even if it does annoy the well-educated Terry Eagletons of the world; after all, that kind of naive theology is a guiding force among a very large and demonstrably influential fraction of the population. The reality of a religion is manifested in the actions of its adherents. But even an appeal to more nuanced thinking doesn’t save God from the dustbin of intellectual history. The universe is going to keep existing without any help, peacefully solving its equations of motion along the way; if we want to find meaning through compassion and love, we have to create it ourselves.He summed it up very well. Much better than I did.
I complained earlier (much earlier, before any of these reviews of Dawkins had come out) that I felt Dawkins' and Harris' work didn't address the deeper and more complex apologia. I said I understood them to be akin to literary generals, marshalling troops into a culture war. That is a necessary component to my own (and a largely shared goal amongst many like me) hope for the future -- arguing away religious fundamentalism.
Am I deluded? Probably. Does that change my motive, or energy? No. I see danger lurking inside of irrational beliefs. I confront it as best I can, and counter it with arguments as rational as I can develop. Will the validity of my arguments correlate indirectly to religious fundamentalism? Probably not. Will that dissuade me from the importance and gravity of my cause? No.
I think a book needs to be published from a godless perspective parallel to Paul Copan's How Do You Know You're Not Wrong? (I own it, btw) A concise, but footnoted and indexed, outlined and progressive, hard-hitting summary of the arguments against religion in general, and for atheism in general. An updated, expanded, more technical version of George Smith's classic work. When I say "concise" I do not mean less than 200 pages. But I mean summarizing the arguments with the minimal support required. Dealing with and dispatching some of the major objections to each argument for atheism. References to infidels.org and all of the popular, articulate atheist bloggers out there.
I am aware that Dawkins and Harris have a wide audience in mind, and write it that way. I am also aware that they do not have the sort of textbook-style work that needs to be written. Perhaps I should feel inspired...perhaps...
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