Reading: 'The God Delusion', chapter 1

(2006, London: Bantam press)

Cards on the table: I'm not a big fan of Richard Dawkins' views on religion. I think The Selfish Gene is one of the best introductory biology books ever written, and I think his ideas about memetics are also pretty interesting. But I find his writings about religion to be frankly obnoxious. I don't see why theists should feel obliged to engage in debate with someone who doesn't seem to prepared to refrain from ad hominems. If the point is that the origins of religion should be an object of scientific study (not just theology), then said scientific studies should do their best to maintain some level of neutrality, even if the researchers also have pretty strong personal opinions too. It's the same way as how a biologist can get very passionate about conservation work, but if they publish a scientific journal article about cheetah ecology, then I don't expect them to write something like "the cheetah is a proud and noble beast and the lions who eat their cubs are evil monsters who make me feel sick whenever I look at them" (even if that's what they believe). Some scientists who study religion are actually pretty good at this, but many aren't, and it's really frustrating for those of us who are interested in the topic to have to explain that science + religion doesn't equal "fan of Dawkins who thinks we'd all be better off if religion ceased to exist".

So, speaking as a fence-sitting agnostic, I'm not exactly predisposed to like this book much (although I appreciate the fact that he's at least written an entire book on religion, rather than a book which is mostly about biology but keeps getting sidetracked by discussions of atheism). I'm going to do my best to take his arguments seriously, but if I start misreading him then hopefully someone will point it out.

Chapter 1 is basically Dawkins arguing that 'religion' implies 'theism', by definition. Therefore, feeling a sense of awe at the beauty of the Milky Way is not a religious experience unless the person in question consciously links the feeling to their belief in God. This is important, because Dawkins frequently gets accused of being secretly 'religious' because he talks about getting these feelings of awe in response to natural phenomena. I can see how it must be incredibly irritating to be told you secretly believe the opposite of what you claim to believe. I also agree that Dawkins probably isn't 'religious' by the Western layman's definition of 'religious' (still not sure what I think of 'belief in one or more gods' as an academic definition of religion, although it's probably more useful in some contexts than in others).

Dawkins' definition of 'God', incidentally, appears on p.13: "a supernatural creator that is 'appropriate for us to worship'" (cf Steven Weinburg). At first, I didn't like this definition very much. 'Supernatural' is a notoriously hard word to define cross-culturally. Not all gods are creators, and when they are, that aspect often isn't stressed heavily by their worshippers. Also, I'd want to know whether he's got a definition of 'worship'. It seems like many definitions would apply equally to the behaviour some people display towards kings and rockstars (in which case this definition threatens to make Mick Jagger a 'god'). You could obviously fix that by saying "worship is behaviour directed at a god", but in that case, defining "God" as "beings that people worship" seems a bit tautological.

But then I rethought it, and I decided that most people in the West would probably be happy with that definition, so it's probably workable as long as he's not planning on applying it to cross-cultural contexts.

Dawkins thinks that many scientists have a tendency to use the word 'God' to mean 'the universe', in a kind of pantheistic way. Example: Einstein made various comments like "God does not play dice", then got very irritated when people read those as indicating that he believed in a personal God. Dawkins thinks this sort of use of the word 'God' is just confusing, and should probably be avoided. I can see his point, although I don't agree with his argument that using the word 'God' in depersonalised sense constitutes "an act of intellectual high treason" (p.19).

Something I've never quite understood is why Dawkins seems happy to invest huge amounts of time into talking about religion, but doesn't seem particularly interested in doing much reading on the topic (I could be totally wrong about this, but the kind of people he cites generally seem to give the impression of someone who's middle-class and generically well-read, but not someone who goes out of his way to systematically read through specialist books). There's a quote on p.16 which sheds some light on this:

"The notion that religion is a proper field, in which one might claim expertise, is one that should not go unquestioned. That clergyman presumably would not have deferred to the expertise of a claimed 'fairyologist' on the exact shape and colour of fairy wings."

I can kind of see what he's talking about here- I don't think that someone needs to have completed a theology course before they're allowed to call themselves an atheist or enter into casual debate about religion. But a major part of Dawkins' career seems to be built on making sweeping claims about religion. For example, Dawkins seems to believe quite strongly that religion has a tendency to increase the frequency of wars (based on the fact that when wars happen, the clergy often refer to them as necessary in order to uphold divine will)- see p.1, for a start, I expect there'll be more later. I suspect that in many or most cases, it's actually the other way around- the war is going to happen anyway, due to local political tensions, and so the clergy are expected to fall into line and say that God is also backing the plan. Now, I could be wrong about this, but I think that if Dawkins wants to keep pushing his argument, then it couldn't hurt for him to do some reading up on 'religious wars' in different historical periods, to see whether there's any way to speculate what would have happened if everyone involved had hypothetically been atheists instead.

Even if Dawkins is 100% certain that God doesn't exist, he's presumably aware that religion exists and that some people have put quite a lot of effort into studying it. If he wants, he can opt not to read things written by people who are consciously trying to promote religion, but even then, there's been quite a lot of stuff written by atheists who are doing their best to understand and accurately describe religious beliefs.

Even if we assume, as Dawkins seems to, that religious people are basically all unstable schizophrenics, it seems a bit stupid to believe that 'fairyology' is thereby rendered irrelevant. For example, if some fairyologists believe that fairies are basically kind and gentle, others believe that they're mischevious but can be persuaded to help people, and then others believe that they are wrathful creatures which support the stoning of unbelievers- well, I'd have thought Dawkins would have an interest in knowing roughly what percentage fall into the third category.