Do you believe......

Thought this was a pretty neat critique of Dawkins. Makes the point that he completely fails to grasp the intricacies of religion and theology.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/eagl01_.html

Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton

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.