In the comments box over at Butterflies and Wheels, Daniel Davies asserts that Richard Dawkins is "to rationalism what George Galloway is to anti-imperialism". I think he's right – especially after reading Dawkins' dreadful new book The God Delusion. My review of it should appear in the press this weekend.
Richard Dawkins
THE GOD DELUSION
Bantam Press, £20
John Stuart Mill famously drew a contrast between the outlooks of his intellectual mentors, Jeremy Bentham and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Where Bentham, Mill said, would always ask of a proposition or a belief “is it true?”, for Coleridge the more interesting question was “what is the meaning of it?” The fact that intelligent people have believed in a given doctrine was, Coleridge thought, sufficient reason to take it seriously, whether or not one happens to believe it to be true. Bentham, on the other hand, simply treated views he didn’t hold with “good-humoured contempt”.
Richard Dawkins’ new book about religion is unapologetically Benthamite in approach, and consequently is long on contempt (though it is rarely good-humoured). It is also sophomoric, repetitive and, on occasion, startlingly poorly written – “I must beware”, Dawkins writes at one point, “of riding off on my pet steed Tangent”. Such embarrassing lapses of taste, surprising in a writer routinely praised for the compressed elegance of his style, are, I think, a sign of deeper, more substantial intellectual difficulties.
Principal among these is Dawkins’ understanding of what atheism is and what it entails. For Dawkins, atheism, which is the view that there are no supernatural entities, only physical stuff, is necessarily anti-religious. On his account, it is not possible, or at least not consistent, to believe that religion is false without also disdaining all of its works. But there is no reason that this should be so – and in fact Dawkins himself shows us why. It is possible to make a positive case for atheism that doesn’t emphasise the harmful effects of religious belief, and this is exactly what Dawkins does in the first part of the book (after which one wishes he’d stopped).
Dawkins’ Darwinian argument against the “God hypothesis” runs something like this: the universe has the appearance of having been designed, so improbably complex is it. Whence the temptation to attribute this appearance to a designer. But the existence of a supernatural designer of the universe is even more improbable than that of the infinitely complex universe itself. And worse still, positing such an entity invites the question of who designed the designer. Adopting the terms of the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Dawkins says that a plausible explanation of complexity requires not a “skyhook” (i.e. God) but a “crane”. And the best crane we have is Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which shows that the appearance of design is in fact an illusion.
This argument is so powerful that Dawkins can’t see how any rational person could dispute it. How is it possible for a mind to hold beliefs it knows to be false? He canvasses some evolutionary answers to this question, borrowing heavily from the work of Dennett and the psychologist Paul Bloom.
But is this the whole story? It would be if religious belief were simply a matter of metaphysics; if, in other words, being a believer was just a matter of having a theory about the nature of reality. However, religious (or at least Christian) concepts also serve to articulate a moral vision – one in which all human lives are of equal worth. Dawkins is both sublimely indifferent to what a religious conception of human beings actually involves, and altogether more confident than most moral philosophers are that secular sense can easily be made of the idea that every individual human being is precious.