[Peace-discuss] Dawkins, "The God Delusion"

[C. G. Estabrook]

[After a recent AWARE WG meeting, Mort and I fell into discussion about
Richard Dawkins' recent book.  Here's a review of it by Terry Eagleton,
a protege of my ghostly father, Herbert McCabe. --CGE]

	LRB | Vol. 28 No. 20 dated 19 October 2006
	Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
	Terry Eagleton
	The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
	Bantam, 406 pp, £20.00

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what
it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t
believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything
worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar
caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology
student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed
their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment
on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt
bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to
theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days,
theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of
the word than in its medieval heyday.

Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who filed
eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet Jacques
Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one suspects, had read
more than a few pages of his work, and even that judgment might be
excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless have been horrified to
receive an essay on Hume from a student who had not read his Treatise of
Human Nature. There are always topics on which otherwise scrupulous
minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle to the grossest prejudice.
For a lot of academic psychologists, it is Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge
philosophers it is Heidegger; for former citizens of the Soviet bloc it
is the writings of Marx; for militant rationalists it is religion.

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological
differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on
subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of
them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you can
defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its toughest
case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by theologians that
he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge he rebuts in this
book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by, they are absolutely
right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an enormous amount in common
with Ian Paisley and American TV evangelists. Both parties agree pretty
much on what religion is; it’s just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral
Roberts and his unctuous tribe grow fat on it.

A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to suffice.
Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that Christian and
Muslim children are brought up to believe unquestioningly. Not even the
dim-witted clerics who knocked me about at grammar school thought that.
For mainstream Christianity, reason, argument and honest doubt have
always played an integral role in belief. (Where, given that he invites
us at one point to question everything, is Dawkins’s own critique of
science, objectivity, liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be
sure, doesn’t go all the way down for believers, but it doesn’t for most
sensitive, civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins
lives more by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no
unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable to
entertain. Only positivists think that ‘rational’ means ‘scientific’.
Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science and religion are
not in competition on the grounds that this insulates religion from
rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that science and
religion pose different questions to the world is not to suggest that if
the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the pope should get
himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It is rather to
claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve factual
knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you to be
coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that justifies
it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed description of you
without being in love with you himself.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a scientific
hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration. Christianity teaches
that to claim that there is a God must be reasonable, but that this is
not at all the same thing as faith. Believing in God, whatever Dawkins
might think, is not like concluding that aliens or the tooth fairy
exist. God is not a celestial super-object or divine UFO, about whose
existence we must remain agnostic until all the evidence is in.
Theologians do not believe that he is either inside or outside the
universe, as Dawkins thinks they do. His transcendence and invisibility
are part of what he is, which is not the case with the Loch Ness
monster. This is not to say that religious people believe in a black
hole, because they also consider that God has revealed himself: not, as
Dawkins thinks, in the guise of a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than
Dawkins himself (the New Testament has next to nothing to say about God
as Creator), but for Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and
murdered political criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had
faith in God, but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a
number of international conferences they decided to endorse the
scientific hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the
universe – even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion.
They had faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may
well have been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken
because their scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely
obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not
exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however
supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people
simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an
octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a
person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an
entity, or ‘existent’: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly
coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist.
He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever,
including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather
than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than
my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by
the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being
by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had
no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a
measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of
love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an
inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art,
there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to
regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte
gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it,
not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will
impress his research grant body no end.

Because the universe is God’s, it shares in his life, which is the life
of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science and
Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of human
beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment but, as
Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like the
unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the
source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent
on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and
fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise
the relation between God and humanity.

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his
Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional
doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of us
(which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us about),
he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be allowed to
love us. Dawkins’s God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan (‘accuser’ in
Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and punitive judge,
and Dawkins’s God is precisely such a repulsive superego. This false
consciousness is overthrown in the person of Jesus, who reveals the
Father as friend and lover rather than judge. Dawkins’s Supreme Being is
the God of those who seek to avert divine wrath by sacrificing animals,
being choosy in their diet and being impeccably well behaved. They
cannot accept the scandal that God loves them just as they are, in all
their moral shabbiness. This is one reason St Paul remarks that the law
is cursed. Dawkins sees Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic
notion of atonement – of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own
child in recompense for being offended – and describes the belief as
vicious and obnoxious. It’s a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury
couldn’t agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that
murdered Jesus.

Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don’t look eagerly forward to
death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does
not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human life
deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The suicide
abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr surrenders his
or her most precious possession for the ultimate well-being of others.
This act of self-giving is generally known as sacrifice, a word that has
unjustly accrued all sorts of politically incorrect implications. Jesus,
Dawkins speculates, might have desired his own betrayal and death, a
case the New Testament writers deliberately seek to rebuff by including
the Gethsemane scene, in which Jesus is clearly panicking at the
prospect of his impending execution. They also put words into his mouth
when he is on the cross to make much the same point. Jesus did not die
because he was mad or masochistic, but because the Roman state and its
assorted local lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of
love, mercy and justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the
poor, and did away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly
volatile political situation. Several of Jesus’ close comrades were
probably Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement.
Judas’ surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes
his treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader
in bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the
Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons of
destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in
bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed ‘derive his ethics from the
Scriptures’ (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new
set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a
leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded
on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its
own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this
faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his
Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews
that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in his
nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when they
see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent
empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image of this
God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood. Salvation for
Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the
immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not
a ‘religious’ affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual
behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic prohibition on meat on
Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual
about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle
queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and
possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently, and
insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He also
cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the
crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human
history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but
only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire
condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don’t see this
dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are
likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as infinite
human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded apologist. Or they
might be well-intentioned reformers or social democrats, which from a
Christian standpoint simply isn’t radical enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a
bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert
McCabe, that if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill
you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people. It was,
of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in the same
passage describes religion as the ‘heart of a heartless world, the soul
of soulless conditions’, was rather more judicious and dialectical in
his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing, mispunching Dawkins.

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth
fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to
reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular
culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case
at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the
cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The mainstream
theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but anyone who holds
it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins considers that no
religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of any respect
whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man deeply averse
to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists, are to be
ferociously contested, since they can always lead to fanaticism.

Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays
degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my view
this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure way,
Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible for
Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly from a
man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about science (there
are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its fallibility), and who
could refrain from writing sentences like ‘this objection [to a
particular scientific view] can be answered by the suggestion . . . that
there are many universes,’ as though a suggestion constituted a
scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that science and technology have
wreaked on humanity, he is predictably silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far
more likely to be the product of them than the work of religion. Swap
you the Inquisition for chemical warfare.

Such is Dawkins’s unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of
almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede that
a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view which is
as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The countless
millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the service of
others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped from human
history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against bigotry. He is
like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like the puritan and
sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is self-evidently
absent. He thinks, for example, that the ethno-political conflict in
Northern Ireland would evaporate if religion did, which to someone like
me, who lives there part of the time, betrays just how little he knows
about it. He also thinks rather strangely that the terms Loyalist and
Nationalist are ‘euphemisms’ for Protestant and Catholic, and clearly
doesn’t know the difference between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a
Nationalist and a Republican. He also holds, against a good deal of the
available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion
rather than politics.

These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the
opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class liberal
rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as though ‘Thou
still unravish’d bride of quietness’ is a mighty funny way to describe a
Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he would not be Europe’s
greatest enthusiast for Foucault, psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism,
anarchism or separatist feminism. All of these phenomena, one imagines,
would be as distasteful to his brisk, bloodless rationality as the
virgin birth. Yet one can of course be an atheist and a fervent fan of
them all. His God-hating, then, is by no means simply the view of a
scientist admirably cleansed of prejudice. It belongs to a specific
cultural context. One would not expect to muster many votes for either
anarchism or the virgin birth in North Oxford. (I should point out that
I use the term North Oxford in an ideological rather than geographical
sense. Dawkins may be relieved to know that I don’t actually know where
he lives.)

There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in
what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from,
among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and
provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular Ten
Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us to
enjoy our sex lives so long as they don’t damage others, are for the
most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests
fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes have
never been matched in his work by a critique of the global capitalism
that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of humiliation
that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media chatter has it,
it’s all down to religion.

It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an
old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in a
zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with just
the occasional ‘reversal’. ‘The whole wave,’ he rhapsodises in the
finest Whiggish manner, ‘keeps moving.’ There are, he generously
concedes, ‘local and temporary setbacks’ like the present US government
– as though that regime were an electoral aberration, rather than the
harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world order that we will
probably have to live with for as long as we can foresee. Dawkins, by
contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish way, that ‘the progressive
trend is unmistakable and it will continue.’ So there we are, then: we
have it from the mouth of Mr Public Science himself that aside from a
few local, temporary hiccups like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic
wars and nuclear wastelands, History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ‘sophisticated’
religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist
religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is
also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying
that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge numbers of
believers who hold something like the theology I outlined above can thus
be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder abortionists and malign
homosexuals. As far as such outrages go, however, The God Delusion does
a very fine job indeed. The two most deadly texts on the planet, apart
perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld’s emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and
Dawkins, as one the best of liberals as well as one of the worst, has
done a magnificent job over the years of speaking out against that
particular strain of psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether
Texan or Taliban. He is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed
liberalism which believes that one has to respect other people’s silly
or obnoxious ideas just because they are other people’s. In its
admirably angry way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists
in the US is nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago.
The book is full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion,
fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe
that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing
their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all
this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific
colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically
illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most frequently
mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an individual.

Terry Eagleton is John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at
Manchester University. His latest book is How to Read a Poem.

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