Author: Ophelia Benson

Curious about the latest rash of misrepresentations of Dawkins, I’ve been re-reading The God Delusion in order to compare what he says with what people like John Cornwell and Mark Vernon claim he says.

First of all there’s the ‘he ignores sophisticated theology’ complaint, the ‘God is not an old guy in the sky, God is the ground of all fzzzwrkklppp’ complaint. He says right at the outset that he’s not talking about the more rarefied or ‘sophisticated’ ideas of god. Page 20:

My title, The God Delusion, does not refer to the God of Einstein and the other enlightened scientists…In the rest of this book I am talking only about supernatural gods, of which the most familiar to the majority of my readers will be Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.

That’s what the book is about – so the grandiloquent but empty oratory of Terry Eagleton and Chris Hedges is simply thrown away, because irrelevant.

Then there’s the question of hostility, and the tension between religion and science, and whether it makes sense to call him a ‘fundamentalist atheist.’ Page 284:

As a scientist, I am hostile to fundamentalist religion because it actively debauches the scientific enterprise. It teaches us not to change our minds, and not to want to know exciting things that are available to be known. It subverts science and saps the intellect.

That’s not a fundamentalist thing to say – it’s an inherently and searchingly antifundamentalist thing to say. Fundamentalists are not interested in changing our minds or in wanting to know all possible exciting things that are available to be known. It’s a perversion of meaning and of argument to claim that someone who defends the value of changing our minds and of wanting to know exciting things is a fundamentalist. It’s such a fundamental perversion of meaning that it’s hard not to suspect bad intentions.

Then there’s the issue of ‘moderate’ religion making the world safe for the other kind. Page 286:

Fundamentalist religion is hell-bent on ruining the scientific education of countless thousands of innocent, well-meaning, eager young minds. Non-fundamentalist, ‘sensible’ religion may not be doing that. But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism by teaching children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue.

He could have worded that last sentence differently – he could have said ‘But it is making the world safe for fundamentalism to the extent that it teaches children, from their earliest years, that unquestioning faith is a virtue’ – and that would have been better, because it may be the case that some ‘sensible’ religion doesn’t teach children that unquestioning faith is a virtue. But I think the basic idea is reasonable, and probably right, and well worth pointing out at a time when the word ‘faith’ is valorized all over the damn place.

This is not to say that the book is without flaws; I don’t think it is. I think in the effort to reach a broad audience, Dawkins uses a demotic language which sometimes becomes merely vulgar. But all the same, so far I’ve found quite a few passages that simply say the opposite of what Cornwell and Vernon and Alibhai-Brown claim he says.

Not everyone who reads this page reads comments, so I’ll comment a little on Mark Vernon’s reply to He doubted doubt out here.

Did I ever say that atheists per se can’t do doubt? It’s the militant sort that apparently find uncertainty so offensive in relation to religion – hence, for example, the argument that a liberal faith is a cover for religious terrorism. But since, obviously, you won’t believe me, try Julian Baggini’s Very Short Introduction for a reference on why this matters to the state of atheism, let alone anything else.

I have tried Julian’s book (and have said good things about it here), and I’ve known him to use the modifier ‘militant’ of atheists in other places as well – but I think he shouldn’t: I think that’s a misleading and unfair word to use of atheists who merely make particular arguments (as opposed to setting off bombs or making threats). I told him that when we were in Amherst in July, and he saw my point, I think; he suggested a less pejorative term, but I forget what it was. That addresses the word rather than the larger argument, but I think the word poisons the well. In any case I don’t agree that argumentative atheists (let us call them) do find uncertainty ‘offensive’; I think that’s more misrepresentation and obfuscation.

Similarly, the point about Cornwell having doubted his doubt is that it makes him wholly unlike the Pope et al who too apparently feel that certainty on matters theological is best.

But not all that wholly unlike the pope now, since he’s gone back to being a Catholic, yet Vernon seemed to be making it a virtue that Cornwell ‘doubted doubt.’ That looked to me like classic eating cake and having it. Cornwell is a double-doubter and he has ‘faith’ again. Impressive.

On your previous post: as above, don’t take it from me that Dawkins believes science will one day ask all questions worth asking and provide the best answers…

But that’s not what Vernon said Dawkins said; what he said was ‘Rather than grappling with the possibility that there are areas of experience on which reason and experiment can throw no or little light, Dawkins marches blindly behind a banner calling blithely for more and more scientific, atheistic light,’ which is different; it’s more obscurantist and more presumptuous. Are there ‘areas of experience’ on which reason and experiment can throw no or little light? Perhaps that’s just an inflated way of claiming that there are areas of experience that science can’t fully or satisfactorily describe, just a way of saying that we need novels and memoirs and conversation as well as science if we want a rich understanding of experience. But the trouble with that of course is that Dawkins would never disagree with it, so it had to be reworded for the sake of picking a fight.

…take it from him: apart from much in The God Delusion itself, take a look at just one quick reference, the last paragraph of his essay in Is Nothing Sacred? edited by Ben Rogers.

I find that a little annoying. Of course, Vernon is under no obligation to provide quotations, but since he is replying, it seems evasive just to say ‘much in The God Delusion’ without any specific references and then offer a book that I’m not especially likely to have and in fact don’t have. So I’m going to go on thinking that Dawkins doesn’t think what Vernon says he thinks – because I think Vernon has a strong tendency to misrepresent what people say by paraphrasing and rewording it.

And he’s still calling us ‘militant.’

He cuts through militant atheism like a wire through cheese: faith is not deluded it’s human (in the same sense that art and literature is) with the corrolary that calling faith deluded leaves you open to the charge of being inhuman yourself.

It’s morally dubious to call people ‘militant’ when it must be obvious that they’re no such thing. Figurative language is all very well, but calling people murderous or terrorist or militant goes beyond mere metaphor. And his claim there is as obviously absurd as so many of his claims on this subject. Faith is not human ‘in the same sense that art and literature is’ precisely because art and literature do not involve ‘faith’ that invented characters really do exist, while faith in God does. ‘Faith’ and literature are both human, of course, but they’re not human ‘in the same sense’ (not that it’s clear what that means, but it is fairly clear that Vernon intends it to leave the impression that they are the same kind of thinking or belief or suspension of disbelief – and that’s not true).

Even militant agnostics should argue both fairly and reasonably.

As Jean Kazez mentioned in comments, Mark Vernon has an article in TPM about doubt and agnosticism. He does indeed, and I disagree with much of it, in some places quite strongly. I always did, but I kept it to myself.

First he was a priest, then he became an atheist. And then –

I found I was actually becoming an agnostic. Over time, I came to feel that the triumphalism that too often seems to be part and parcel of atheism entails a poverty of spirit that is detrimental to our humanity. It tends to ignore or ridicule the “big” questions of life – those questions of existence that are natural to ask, if never finding conclusive answers – for fear of letting theology in through the back door.

I don’t think that’s true. (Of course, Vernon’s experience of atheists is probably different from mine, and maybe he does know lots of atheists like that – but in terms of public atheists, atheists who write about atheism in books and magazines, I don’t recognize his description.) I think he phrases it (as so often) too sweepingly. What I see atheists ridicule is not the questions themselves but the assumption that the questions have external answers, and that the answers are of a goddy or ‘spiritual’ kind.

I came to think that whether or not God exists is an open question, having pondered the arguments for and against several times over. And that keeping it open, rather than trying to find a knockout blow one way or another, is key.

Too sweeping, again. (Also awkward. I should have rearranged that first sentence, so that the ‘having pondered’ came first. My bad.) In a sense the existence of God is always an open question, because (as theists are always so brightly saying) it can’t be proven one way or the other. But this notion of keeping it open rather than trying to find a ‘knockout blow’ is just a dressed up way of saying the whole subject should be left alone, should be abandoned, should be a matter of ‘faith’ or its absence – should, in short, be immune from rational inquiry. But it shouldn’t. That’s because what we’re trying to find (‘we’ being atheists) is not really a knockout blow and not just whether or not god exists, but whether or not there are any good reasons to think god exists. We’re working on an epistemological issue as well as an ontological one, and I don’t think Mark Vernon has much business telling us we should stop doing that. We live in a world full of people more or less commanding us to believe that god does exist – a world in which Osama bin Laden has just very definitely commanded us to believe that Allah exists and to convert to his religion – and we want to go on asking why we should believe it.

My agnosticism gradually became more committed and passionate. It seemed to me to embody an attitude to life that is severely, even dangerously, lacking in public life. Think of the endless skirmishes between science and religion. They are at best a cul-de-sac, and at worse a risky self-indulgence…They are dangerous because in forcing people to take sides, they are pushed to fundamentalist extremes – whether based on religious or scientific dogma.

This is where Vernon’s way of proceeding becomes markedly strange. He presents himself as a passionate agnostic, yet in service of that he misrepresents both atheism and science, thus making an honest discussion impossible as long as we take his terms at face value. How can we have honest doubt if we’re talking about things that we misunderstand because they’ve been misdescribed? Talking about science in terms of dogma and fundamentalism, and making it an equivalent of religion, is a profound misrepresentation, and it renders everything he says suspect. I’m sorry to say this (especially since he might read it!) but rhetoric of that kind makes it hard for me to believe that he’s arguing in good faith.

This rides roughshod over the intellectual ground that is genuinely fascinating, humanly enriching, and socially essential: the places where science and religion reach the respective limits of their understanding and meet. The militant atheist, like the fundamentalist believer, tries to rubbish such engagement because it offends their faith that science, or religion, can and should say it all.

More of the same – ‘faith’ that ‘science’ – ‘science, or religion’ as if they were equivalents – and the nonsense about the two reaching the respective limits of their understanding and then meeting. They don’t meet! Religion qua religion has no particular understanding – it incorporates various kinds of human understanding, often even including rational understanding, but not in any distinctively religious way, and to the extent that the ‘understanding’ is distinctively religious, it’s not understanding, it’s error. And the limits of scientific understanding don’t come anywhere near the limits of religious understanding, so ‘meeting’ is out of the question. It sounds cozy and friendly, but it’s bullshit.

So, my curiosity renewed about Vernon’s much-recycled trope that only theists doubt while atheists are full of certainty, I amble over to his blog and find an even more ridiculous example. He’s praising John Cornwell’s book on Dawkins:

It is a gently written, precision riposte to The God Delusion. Cornwell used to be an agnostic and so appreciates the place of doubt in life. He also ‘doubted his doubt’ and returned to the Catholic faith…

Ah – so he’s a doubly wonderful fella because he doubted not once but twice, thus returning to ‘the Catholic faith’ which of course as is well known is all about doubt and always has been. That’s what the pope is for, that’s what the Vatican is for, that’s what encyclicals are for – to reiterate the value and merit of doubt. Returning to the Catholic faith is admirable, while pointing out the flaws in ‘faith’ as a way of thinking is wicked because it fails to appreciate the place of doubt in life.

This stuff is really beginning to get on my nerves. What next? Rapists are admirable because they appreciate the place of women’s rights in life? Corrupt officials are admirable because they appreciate the place of integrity and duty in life? Why does Mark Vernon – an ex-priest – get to pat himself and his theist buddies on the back for being appreciators of doubt while they all get together to distort and swear at the arguments of atheists? Why is faith doubt while lack of faith is certainty? Why doesn’t someone slap them with a wet mackerel every time they try that trick?

Mark Vernon is annoying. Again.

But if you speak to people who believe literally in the six days of Genesis, they do so in part because they fear the moral nihilism they see as implicit in a Dawkins-style Darwinism. Dawkins’ approach is pretty nihilistic because he insists on the meaning-lite doctrine of ‘science as salvation’, as Mary Midgley put it. He will never win the Creationists over. Rather, he is likely to confirm them in their belief.

Notice the complete absence of substantiation for that silly accusation. Notice the failure even to say what it’s supposed to mean – notice the obnoxious combination of the emphatic verb ‘insists’ with the labeling via someone else’s unexplained epithet. Does Dawkins ‘insist’ on ‘the meaning-lite doctrine of “science as salvation”‘? Not that I know of – but then it’s hard to falsify Vernon there, because it’s hard to know what he means. No doubt that’s why he feels free to end with a flourish by recycling the very stale accusation of being an inadvertent ally of Creationism.

Rather than grappling with the possibility that there are areas of experience on which reason and experiment can throw no or little light, Dawkins marches blindly behind a banner calling blithely for more and more scientific, atheistic light.

Rather than grappling with the possibility that there are areas of experience on which reason and experiment can throw more light than he has the knowledge or imagination to realize, Mark Vernon marches blindly behind a banner calling blithely for closing down inquiry into areas of experience that he thinks should be immune from rational inquiry and experiment.

Vernon talks endlessly about uncertainty and humility, without ever demonstrating either one. He uses the words as sticks to beat atheists, arrogantly and assertively misrepresenting them in the process. He’s another Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, shouting at atheists for not being humble and uncertain.