Richard Dawnkins
Photograph: Don Arnold/Getty/IrishTimes It’s time to outgrow Richard Dawkins, the author of a new critique tells Luke Silke
When it was published in 2006, Richard Dawkins’ takedown of faith The God Delusion remained on the bestseller list for 51 weeks. It was part of a fresh war of words on religion which has since been termed ‘the new atheism’.
It marked an upping of the ante and ushered in an approach where atheists were encouraged not to tolerate religion, but to counter, critique and work to eradicate the influence of faith in education and the public square.
Prof. Dawkins – an evolutionary biologist – has made a career of touring the world rejecting faith as a key to understanding life. He’s back with a vengeance in his latest offering Outgrowing God. But, if the new atheist in the early 2000s caught people off-guard, a new generation of thinkers see right through the strawman arguments proposed by Prof. Dawkins.
Within weeks, Rupert Shortt, who is a Religion Editor of The Times Literary Supplement and a Research Associate at the University of Cambridge, published Outgrowing Dawkins – God for Grown-ups, which serves as somewhat of an intellectual response to Prof. Dawkins’ book, from a perspective of religious faith.
Arguments
Speaking to The Irish Catholic, Mr Shortt outlined the reasons he wrote Outgrowing Dawkins: “The arch-atheist wrote a book called Outgrowing God, I thought this book was worth replying to, even if the arguments are familiar.
“My book is particularly brief, although I hope I avoided superficiality and over-simplification, I have tried to say in under one hundred pages how one can be philosophically and scientifically informed and still go to church without leaving your brain at the door.
“The most important thing I wanted to get across is that the church-goer, or a Muslim or Hindu, needn’t have anything to fear from advances in science. If you think that Dawkins’ theories pose an obstacle to religious belief then you’ve misunderstood the territory.”
For Mr Shortt, Outgrowing God was problematic from the outset, in that it works off an assumption that religion “entails an abusive relationship with a Zues-like figure who idly makes imperfect toys and tortures them for their imperfections if they don’t adore him in return”.
At one level, Prof. Dawkins’ title is misleading – the book isn’t about God, it is about religion or, rather, Dawkins’ view of organised religion, with a primary focus on Christianity.
Mr Shortt said his impression of Prof. Dawkins is that he “seems very disdainful towards anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him”, adding that he feels he swings in maturity, that he has been seen to “dismiss all hostile reviews that he received and say ‘oh well, that must be because the literary editors of the various newspapers sent my book to ‘faith heads’ for review’. So he can stoop to referring to Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. as ‘faith heads’ on one hand, but on the other hand he can have a public debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury, as he did in Oxford in 2012, and describe that encounter as an enormous honour for him.
“He can talk about attending a gathering of science teachers in University College London under the chairmanship of what he termed an ‘enlightened clergyman’. He’s a funny sort of mixture, then he’ll swing back and say that religious education amounts to child abuse!” says Mr Shortt.
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Mr Shortt speaks of an “attitude” of “condescending dismissal” for which he says faith groups must take some blame, as must atheists, especially “those who write best-sellers ridiculing belief-systems they know nothing about”.
Mr Shortt argues that the relationship between God and the world is not like that of a builder to a house, but rather that of an author to a book. He deals with the idea of science versus religion, citing many historic disputes and publications by Prof. Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens whom he refers to as the ‘Four Musketeers’, adding that Stephen Fry is “one of their foremost celebrity cheerleaders”.
Mr Shortt suggests that Prof. Dawkins has prompted “hostility” among other atheists, however he goes on to quote the agnostic Anthony Kenny who brands Prof. Dawkins’ work as an “outright insult”. Outgrowing God amounts to, in Mr Shortt’s view, a “thrashing of what you don’t understand”.
He goes on to say that Prof. Dawkins evidently considers faith to be a source of much more harm than good, and tackles this belief with an analogy – encouraging the reader to imagine the reaction if Prof. Dawkins had dismissed all left-wing politics based on the horrors committed by Joseph Stalin.
Faiths
The major faiths are, Mr Shortt insists, vast sources of social capital and charitable outreach, and this he feels has not been given due consideration by Prof. Dawkins. He reckons that there is something “very unscientific” about the way Prof. Dawkins talks about philanthropic endeavours of human beings with an implication that humanist endeavours are “on all fours” with what our faith-based motivation has come up with.
Mr Shortt encourages us to “look at the world as a whole and you will see that for a vast belt of the planet it’s the local church or the local mosque, in particular, that forms the heart, the hub, for the distribution of aid, medicine or education.
“What flows from religious conviction is enormous and it is something that the Foreign Office in the UK has come around to in the last decade. If the chips were down and we were to look at the statistics we’d see that the record of the Churches were pretty credible, the contribution of religion to social capital was very large, so people who say ‘bad religion’, or suggest that religion does more harm than good, or that ‘there wouldn’t be much difference to our lives if the Churches shut up shop tomorrow’, such people should be careful what they wish for!”
He does acknowledge that Prof. Dawkins, “at his most constructive” poses challenges to Christianity and other faiths “that cannot be brushed aside”. However, in writing this book, Mr Shortt felt a need to tackle the “lies that go around the world while truth is pulling its boots on”.
He says that Prof. Dawkins evidently considers faith to be a source of much more harm than good…”
He thinks that Prof. Dawkins discussion of the Bible, while accurate, is also problematic: “The problem of course is that he reads chapter and verse in a very limited way – his reading of the Bible is completely literalistic, you might say left-brained – he has no understanding of nuance, of the need to understand that the Bible is written in many kinds of register. Its part historic but there’s also poetry there and legal codes, spiritual reflection, etc. therefore trying to read the story of Noah’s Ark as if it were a newspaper report written yesterday just fundamentally misses the point.
“There were people as far back as the 4th Century saying that what really matters about Genesis is that we are here, as a Universe, through God’s choice and God’s act and that things have gone wrong with the human race from an early stage but that God hasn’t given up on us. That spiritual insight is clothed in mythological narrative but over and over again, by missing that point, Richard Dawkins simply throws out the baby with the bath water”.
The same point is made by Shortt in reference to the story of Adam and Eve, arguing that a Christian is not committed to a belief in a “specific transgression involving a snake in a garden 6,000 years ago. A literal acceptance of Genesis 1-3 has never formed part of the creed, but what the story reveals about flaws in human nature is abidingly true”.
Questions
Shortt goes on to tackle the questions regarding the God of the Old Testament as being vengeful, rather than loving. He says that historically the Church has taught that the full exposure of God’s Trinitarian identity did not emerge until the life and death of Jesus Christ and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
This suggests that a true understanding of what God was like, or a true knowledge of God did not exist in the books of the Old Testament and it isn’t until the New Testament that a fuller picture, understanding or definition emerges.
Shortt says that he interviewed many distinguished scientists who are Christian, but also spoke to a very eminent physiologist from Oxford who is not a person of any religious conviction. Shortt relayed to this newspaper the first words with which this physiologist began the discussion: “Well never mind the theology, I think Dawkins is not well spout on the science.” Shortt suggests that Dawkins may not really be in the running as a scientist anymore: “Science has moved on, frankly, since his day. His big thing now is making attacks on religion and Christianity in particular.”
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Dawkins tends to avoid dealing with the Quran in Outgrowing God and Shortt speculates that “perhaps it may be dangerous for him to do so”, however, he has gotten involved with Muslims on Twitter and elsewhere. The focus in Outgrowing God is primarily on the Bible as a religious text.
While Dawkins describes the contrary position to his own as being inherently irrational, Shortt says that his own stance “is very far from being a mirror image of Dawkins”, adding that he has said at an early stage in various books that he’s written that he thinks atheism, as a world view, goes very often unchallenged, “however, I’m not setting out to ridicule people who don’t have a religious faith – they may have good reasons for not being Christians or practicing any other religion – what I’m simply saying in Outgrowing Dawkins is that this world view does hang together, that you can believe it with intellectual integrity.
“I have spoken to a number of distinguished scientists and on that basis Richard Dawkins has fundamentally misled his readers,” he said.
The sincerity of Mr Shortt’s writing, and the genuine respect that he has for Richard Dawkins becomes apparent when an interesting personal connection between the pair is revealed in Outgrowing Dawkins, that though of a different generation from Prof. Dawkins, Mr Shortt sat in the same lab as him decades later and was inspired by the same biology master, a man by the name of Ioan Thomas, as it happens a person of strong Christian conviction.
Ignorance
Mr Shortt points out that religion is “naturally an elusive term”. Not all religions believe in a God, for example. People in the past suffering from ignorance and superstition tended to ascribe things they couldn’t understand to a figure in the sky. Many religions have died out and the existence of certain ‘gods’ is no longer widely accepted. For Mr Shortt, Prof. Dawkins appears to think that the biblical idea of God is merely an amalgamation of other “Near Eastern” beliefs.
This theory, he insists, is proof that “little knowledge is a regrettable thing”, adding that Outgrowing God does not pay any attention to the “markers set down by anthropologists and philosophers, let alone theologians”.
A popular thought experiment is proposed by Mr Shortt when dealing with the topic of polytheism versus monotheism – a topic Prof. Dawkins deals with early on in Outgrowing God – the idea proposed is to imagine that one sums up everything in the universe and reaches a figure of n, one cannot therefore conclude that the total is n + 1 because one is a theist. The argument set about by Mr Shortt, on foot of this thought experiment, is that “Divinity and creaturehood are too different even to be thought of as opposites”.
Exposed, in Outgrowing Dawkins, is Prof. Dawkins’ tendency to cut corners, and his apparent “lack of intellectual curiosity” according to Mr Shortt. The language used throughout takes issue, in a tongue in cheek sort of way, with the fact that Prof. Dawkins’ problem seems not to be with the existence of God, but with the people who believe in God or organised religion. If anything, both Outgrowing God and Outgrowing Dawkins prove that this is a debate – that no book can put an end to the age-old question of the existence of God – in this instance Prof. Dawkins’ book, which sought to do so, was followed rapidly by a book which seeks to tackle his thinking.
The belief that God doesn’t exist is a belief. But Prof. Dawkins seeks to highlight flaws in religious and faith systems while maintaining a faith himself which is not without its flaws, a belief which cannot be proven. There is somewhat of an irony in this.
Mr Shortt says that his project is, in a way, “about Dawkins, who has a large profile and has made attacks on religion, or what he thinks is religion, but what is in fact gross caricatures of religion”. Mr Shortt is doubtful about the prospect of his book sparking writings from Prof. Dawkins titled Outgrowing Shortt, but lives in hope for “maybe a spiteful blog or something!”
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Prof. Dawkins tends not to engage with some other rebuttals and Mr Shortt feels that this is because he is “disdainful” towards those who pick holes in his arguments and theories.
Mr Shortt believes that Prof. Dawkins would, of course, claim otherwise: “He’d probably say that his problem is with forced beliefs rather than those who believe them.
“If you think that people of faith believe propositions that are completely untrue, given that these propositions also influence their lives to a large degree, it’s likely that such people, in the view of someone like Dawkins, are going to do lots of harm. But I’m not sure I can generalise given that he himself seems to be torn between different versions of himself,” he says.
One thing which really struck Mr Shortt while he was working on this project was how “contestable” Prof. Dawkins’ arguments were on the science, not just on theology or philosophy. This is a point which he drives home frequently.
But that is another day’s work.