McGrath on Dawkins: “philosophically naïve and deficient”

4 February 2007 · Comments 

Richard Dawkins’ self-appointed nemesis, the equally vociferous Alistair McGrath, is to release another ad hominem titled book, The Dawkins Delusion? later this month.

On the Ekklesia (a religious think tank) web site there is, what basically boils down to, an advertisement for this book masquerading as a news article. This article also acts as a mouthpiece for McGrath to take a few scattered pot shots at Dawkins.

McGrath, who holds doctorates in both molecular biophysics and theology, was formerly an atheist himself, and has praised the scientific writing of Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, also at Oxford. But he argues that Dawkins’ increasingly shrill critique of religion is simplistic.

In an earlier book, ‘Dawkins’ God: Genes, Memes and the Meaning of Life’, which Professor Dawkins has declined to respond to, other than through a short rhetorical dismissal, Professor McGrath claimed his colleague’s anti-religious pronouncements were philosophically naïve and deficient.

“Formerly an atheist”? I would have thought that at birth, babies generally don’t have any understanding of christian (or any other) dogma, so are de facto atheists. Is this what they mean here?

Anyway… McGrath here complains that Dawkins’ criticisms of religion are simplistic and philosophically naïve and deficient. I would opine, though, that most of the people who are of a theistic bent that read The God Delusion are just as theologically inept, perhaps even more so if they haven’t actually taken the time to investigate their faith.

Unlike McGrath, most believers don’t have PhDs in theology, I would gambit that most of them haven’t even read their scripture the whole way through, and I would not be surprised to learn that most of them haven’t taken any time to think about their faith critically. To call Dawkins’ theological or philosophical credentials into question, as Eagleton did in his infamous Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching review in the London Review of Books, is to completely miss the entire point of the book.

In an issue of The War Cry, a balanced and well-adjusted organ if ever there was one, McGrath wrote:

Dawkins works on the assumption that his readers know very little about Christianity. He asserts that if you believe in evolution then you cannot believe in God, because evolution is by definition atheistic. But that is a very inaccurate interpretation.

Exactly how is this inaccurate? As mentioned above, most non-theological believers don’t know very much about christianity, it’s origins, the horrors discharged in its name (except the Inquisition, I’d expect most people to have heard about that little episode), the sheer incredulity and brutality that those parts of the bible not mentioned in the sunday schools or from the pulpit are full of, the philosophical arguments for and against a god, and so on.

Does McGrath really think that the grannies that gather together every Sunday at 11am for a singalong, a cup of tea and a natter with the parson are theologically literate? Does he presume to think that most people who, in the UK, call themselves CofE, yet don’t bother going to church apart from the usual BM&D reasons, actually give two figs about whether there is or isn’t a god? I say that you’re barking up the bloody wrong tree there, mate. He goes on:

Dawkins also interprets a Christian’s ‘faith’ as ‘blind trust’. To him ‘faith’ means running away from evidence. But that’s not a Christian definition of faith… People like simple answers to hard questions. That’s why Dawkins is so popular.

People like simple answers to hard questions? Of course they bloody do! What simpler answer is there to any question than “god did it, so leave it alone”?! That’s exactly who The God Delusion is aimed at!

He continues: “When I was an atheist, I sounded like Richard Dawkins. I focused only on the things that fitted my theory. One of the things that made me stop being an atheist was realising things are rather more complicated.”

I love it when people use their own well-rehearsed diatribes to prove their own point.

Really, McGrath dude, get a clue…

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Happy (Chinese) New Year!

29 January 2007 · Comments 

Year of the Bleep

China’s ruling Communist Party has banned images and mention of ****in TV advertisements airing over the lunar new year to avoid offending the country’s Muslims, an advertising agency said on Friday.

Uncensored version of this image after the cut.
Read more

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Special treatment for catholics?

23 January 2007 · Comments 

As reported in The Independent on Sunday on 21 January 2007, the news that the catholic church is pressing the British government to allow an exeption to the recently passed anti-discrimination law regarding sexuality has reached the mainstream media (BBC, The Times).

At the moment, only Ruth Kelly and the prime minister, Tony Blair, are supportive of the catholics’ attempt to change the law to their own demands. Kelly is a known catholic, and Blair is a catholic supporter (his wife, Cherie Booth, is a catholic) and has had meetings with both the currrent pope and his predecessor. Blair, it is thought, is expected to convert to catholicism after he leaves government office.

As I noted previously, Ruth Kelly, the Secretary of State for Communities, is hardly the best person to represent those who are discriminated against, especially considering that she a) is a strict catholic (and probably a member of Opus Dei); b) has abstained from every single major vote on homosexual rights.

Today I learned that, not only is the government considering relenting to the demands of the catholics to allow them (and only them) to legally express their bigotry but, that this government is attempting to subvert the welfare support system by actively promoting religious-welfare programmes (source: DWP).

So, what does this mean?

At the moment, the catholics are attempting to get an exemption to anti-discrimination legislation, which would allow them to refuse to accept adoption requests from homosexual couples.

The Department of Work and Pensions is aiming to promote religious supply of more mainstream welfare services (of which adoption is already one) such as support for the homeless, etc.

Mr Murphy announced he was hosting a national seminar in the coming weeks that will bring together faith organisations of all persuasions to discuss how they could contribute further to the welfare state and what more the Government can do to facilitate this.DWP press release

If this exemption goes through, and the government funds religious groups to offer state-sponsored welfare programmes, what is to stop the catholic church (or any other church) from further demanding extra exemptions for these programmes? The precedent would already have been set, and it would be more difficult (legally) to turn back the clock.

What this would amount to would be the Vatican dictating public policy, determining how the welfare infrastructure of Britain would be run. It would also allow for any special interest group to assert that they too are also eligible for special treatment.

I fear having our government policy, and hence our legal, economic and welfare systems being dictated to from the Vatican or by the whims of any other group. If I wanted to live in a theocracy, I’d move to one.

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The Independent: Ask Dawkins

4 December 2006 · Comments 

Today’s The Independent featured Dawkins in the You Ask The Questions segment.

Some interesting questions (and equally interesting answers) there.

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The Independent: Dawkins takes fight against religion into the classroom

27 November 2006 · Comments 

In today’s The Independent there is a feature about zoologist Richard Dawkins and his new foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Professor Dawkins will also be the subject of You Ask the Questions in The Independent next Monday.

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The Independent: Another christian who just doesn’t “get it”

26 November 2006 · Comments 

In today’s The Independent on Sunday, there’s an editorial by Giles Fraser, lecturer in Philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford, where he calls for a new sort of conversation about religion. I for one would welcome it, although his analysis isn’t completely in agreement with the reasons that atheists, especially the vocal ones like Richard Dawkins and A C Grayling, promote. I don’t think that I’m being arrogant when I say that I understand their viewpoint much better than he does (he’s a christian, although he doesn’t say what flavour — I might presume Anglican).

The old one [conversation] is very tired, as in some overblown boxing match between two bruisers who just won’t topple. The slug it out. Land huge blows. Declare victory. Only for the opponent to rise again (no resurrection reference intended) and for the whole sorry circus to wind itself up for a rematch.

Yes, I agree. The old conversation is very tired. But, how many times is it necessary to have to defend science from attacks from those who haven’t taken the time to get to understand the inner working of it and have some imaginary party line thrown down from a village pulpit? How often is it required to have to explain that a claim made from a position of belief isn’t necessarily a claim of truth or actuality?

I would rather just have these points made once and then accepted, and then move onto the next challenge. Instead, it seems that we (the non-believing community) are increasingly having to defend a lack of faith in a deity, defend reality, defend science from those who think that, because they have a god on their side, their ideas are untouchable and above analysis. I’m sorry, but they’re not. If you make a claim about reality, you’d better have some evidence to back it up.

Of course, I began the project [of giving lectures in pubs in South London] with the distinct anxiety that my faith might be misrepresented by two atheist authors. After all, I am a failed atheist myself and nobody likes a turncoat.

Bzzzt. Incorrect, sir. I do believe that any discussion made with reference to your faith has nothing to do with the fact that you personally could not handle life as an atheist. This is incredibly arrogant.

But something more is needed. For a more interesting discourse about religion would also have to involve the reclamation of agnosticism, of the ability simply to admit that one doesn’t know. In the preface to Richard Dawkins’s new Christmas stocking filler The God Delusion … it cannot have been too difficult a job, for this is a book so lacking in self-doubt that it’s positively evangelical in the confidence of its self-belief. “I may be wrong” is not a sentence one could ever associate with Dawkins. And his work is so much the poorer for that.

Really? I guess you must have skimmed most of the rest of the preface in which he details exactly why he wrote the book and who he expects to get the most out of it. Of course he’s self-confident, he has no other (unlike those with a religious bent) to have confidence in!

And for “I may be wrong” to not be a phrase that he expects to come from Dawkins is just disingenuous. Has he read any of Dawkins’s other literary output, most notably that on zoology or Darwinian evolution? I doubt it, as Dawkins makes perfectly clear what ideas and thoughts (hypotheses, if you like) he cannot justify scientifically (i.e. without evidence). Fraser might want to read Dawkins’s more recent The Ancestor’s Tale for clear examples of this (which become more and more acute the further one reads).

He also doesn’t seem to get the differences between agnosticism and atheism. In brief, agnosticism deals with knowledge and atheism deals with belief — two quite different ideas. As with most vocal atheists, I am a gnostic atheist (I “know” and “believe” that they don’t exist) with regards to the various gods pimped in the likes of The Bible or The Koran, or those of the Norse or the Egyptians as the gods postulated here are just too incredible (in the correct sense of the word) and offer no evidence whatsoever. However, I would also claim to be an agnostic atheist (I don’t “know”, but I don’t believe) with regards to any other gods that may or may not exist. Of course, I don’t know — nobody does — but a lack of evidence of anything like this leads me to believe that they don’t exist either.

Of course, most of us who take pains to think about this particular issue also understand that the various philosophical arguments for gods are, for the main part inconclusive, or can be flatly rejected from the logical contradictions that they demand as reasons for acceptance.

Some atheists are threatened by non-fundamentalist faith. They reckon it a liberal alibi for fundamentalism, offering a more superficially plausible account of God which serves only to shelter fanatics from the sort of criticism that would put them out of business. On this reasoning, atheists have a vested interest in presenting the worst sort of faith as the real thing, thus enabling the whole sorry lot to be all the more easily ridiculed. This is Dawkins’ strategy.

Here’s the nub of the matter, and the idea that Fraser just doesn’t get: religion (and faith) enables acting on irrational thinking. What this means is that people (from the old granny who goes to church on a Sunday morning, right through to the fundementalist terrorists) are then allowed to make moral judgements, and then act on them, without actually thinking about things, and they have an excuse.

And then we have, as Fraser mentions, the nutters from Christian Voice, who believe that they have the final word on moral authority because they have it from The Bible, just as many (if not most or all) scripture-happy groups do. Isn’t this the same Bible that is pushed in who-knows how many thousands of pulpits and Sunday schools across the UK every weekend? There may be differences in interpretation, but who says that a liberal interpretation is correct? If one is to take The Bible in context, liberal attitudes are almost nowhere to be found, so it’s certainly not there. Why don’t the liberally religious take their Bible at face value? Why choose to interpret it in the happy-clappy way you have? Isn’t it because you find the idea of punishing the innocent for non-crimes repugnant? I bet it is.

Yes, we need a new conversation on religion. But the old one isn’t finished, and won’t be until the religious accept that allowing dogmatic non-thinking based on confused scriptures to continue without criticism is a bad thing and something that they must accept responsibility for. Perhaps if this comes to pass, we won’t need a new conversation, and people will continue to believe what they want, and not need to act irrationally on it or force their attitudes on others.

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