The Old New Atheism

A few days I encouraged all and sundry to drop everything they were doing, run to their neighborhood bookseller, purchase a copy of Marilynne Robinson's stellar novel Gilead, call in sick until they've finished it, and then take a sabbatical to think about it.

Those who have not yet done so (say, if they were giving birth or were orbiting Mars) can redeem themselves slightly be reading Ms. Robinson's trenchant review of Richard Dawkins' abysmal (I've had the misfortune of reading it, so I use that word advisedly) newish book, The God Delusion.

A selection, to whet your appetite:

The nineteenth-century abolitionist, feminist, essayist, and ordained minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson made the always timely point that, in comparing religions, great care must be taken to consider the best elements of one with the best of the other, and the worst with the worst, to avoid the usual practice of comparing, let us say, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie with the Golden Rule. The same principle might be applied in the comparison of religion and science. To set the declared hopes of one against the real-world record of the other is clearly not useful, no matter which of them is flattered by the comparison. What is religion? It is described by Dawkins as a virtually universal feature of human culture. But there is, commingled with it, indisputably and perhaps universally, doubt, hypocrisy, and charlatanism. Dawkins, for his part, considers religion wholly delusional, and he condemns the best of it for enabling all the worst of it. Yet if religion is to be blamed for the fraud done in its name, then what of science? Is it to be blamed for the Piltdown hoax, for the long-credited deceptions having to do with cloning in South Korea? If by "science" is meant authentic science, then "religion" must mean authentic religion, granting the difficulties in arriving at these definitions.

I wish, then, to speak of science in the highest sense of the word, as the astonishingly fruitful human venture into understanding of the world and the universe. The reader may assume a somewhat greater admiration on my part for religion in the highest sense of the word, though I will not go into that here. Science thus defined does not claim to understand gravity, light, or time. This is a very short list of its mystifications, its inquiries, all of which are beautiful to ponder. These three are sufficient to persuade me that conclusions about the ultimate nature of things are, to say the least, premature, and that to suggest otherwise is unscientific. The finer-grained the image of reality physicists achieve, the more alien it appears to every known strategy of comprehension.

I'll post my own reactions to Hitchens and Dawkins at some point in the near future. In the meantime, you can treat yourself to another good review, this time by the critic (and Marxist!) Terry Eagleton. I'll get you started by citing the opening paragraph:

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.

For the benefit of the lazy and illiterate, two videos: a good lecture by Roman Williams called "How to Misunderstand Religion" (the text itself seems to have vanished) here, and a debate between an irenic Alister McGrath and a belligerent Christopher Hitchens may be watched here. (Best line of the evening: McGrath to Hitchens: "I take it you do not believe in Hell or anything like that, and therefore I don't see what the difficulty is for you personally.")

My final word for the moment is this: if any of you are even the slightest bit tempted by atheism, then you must read Dawkins or Hitchens, for you'll see that the contemporary case for atheism is intellectually bankrupt.

Illustration: St Nicholas striking Arius at the First Ecumenical Council.