I am a great fan of Richard Dawkins. I have read all his books. I saw him last week on the Colbert Report, and he seems to be a very nice, twinkly, grandfatherly sort of man. He had the air, while going through the unusual process which is a Colbert interview, of someone trying to join in wholeheartedly, if with imperfect understanding, in a child’s game.
So it is not completely surprising that his newest book, The God Delusion, starts off like an extended example of l’esprit de l’escalier — the things he would have responded to the maddening things people say to him, if only he weren’t such a nice guy.
“Lots of scientists believe in God,” people must have said to him. His response? “No they don’t! No they don’t!”
When Einstein talked about God, as he often did, he didn’t mean God. Repeat ad lib with the names of other scientists. This is not all that convincing. In fact,t here is a point at which Dawkins claims that Stephen Jay Gould just flat didn’t believe what he wrote in his book about God and science, but must have been being conciliatory. Stephen Jay Gould is another of my favorite writers, but no one would call him conciliatory. Dawkins must be projecting his own twinkliness, or perhaps just desperately trying to get around the fact that, well, lots of scientists believe in God.
Not that it matters. If he could claim that, say, the Pope was really an atheist, that might have some strength to it as an argument. But scientists are not ipso facto experts on God, and whether or not they believe in God doesn’t actually constitute evidence for or against the existence of God.
Dawkins even claims that fear of being persecuted for atheism causes people in modern times to pretend to be religious. I live in the Bible Belt, and the nearest an atheist could come to persecution here would be the fear of being prayed for against his or her will. That argument — with the possible exception of politicians, for whom being strongly committed to any religious viewpoint including atheism can be dangerous — is silly.
Another maddening thing people seem to have said to him is that “You have to respect people’s beliefs.” He quotes H. L. Mencken on this, to the effect that we have to respect a man’s religious beliefs to the same degree that we have to respect his belief that his wife is beautiful. Mencken wrote Treatise on the Gods, which I quite enjoyed. If you have read it, though, you know that Mencken’s views on religion, and indeed on respect, are very far outside the norm.
This argument has some virtue, though. It is true that we in the U.S., even in our laws, do tend to take the position that something required by a person’s religion trumps all non-religious matters. Employers have to give Friday afternoon off for prayers, but would not consider doing so for a person’s fondness for taking naps on Friday afternoon, though it may be just as sincere.
And we do have an almost ridiculous devotion to respecting religious beliefs. I am sitting here right now trying to think of an example, and cannot, because I fear that a wandering member of the group I choose to describe as ridiculous will be offended, so I guess that proves it.
This extends, of course, to atheists, but that would ruin Dawkins’s other argument, so he ignores that fact.
So that is the first chapter of The God Delusion. I confess that I went ahead and read the second chapter, but I will be waiting for the others in my read-along to catch up and comment before I say anything about that.
I have to disagree with you about the level of persecution folks face. I do not live in the Bible belt and have heard two stories recently from non-Christians about this. In one instance, a child was told on the playground that she was going to burn in Hell since she wasn’t a born-again Christian. I don’t remember the entire story, but the child was in tears when she told her Mom what happened later in the day so it was more than a brief comment. In the other case, a Lutheran minister’s wife berated an adult woman asking her why she wanted to burn in hell after asking what church she belonged to and finding out it was a Unitarian Universalist church (which, actually, has a Christian group so the woman she was berating could have indeed been Christian…). Anyway, my point is that people in America DO react negatively and hurtfully to non-Christians, especially atheists. I read a number of blogs of fundamentalism Christians and suspect at least some of them read mine. I almost never reference my religion because I suspect some of them would stop reading or would ignore my comments if they found out I’m not Christian. hope you aren’t one of them since I’ve now told you 😉 I worry about how my daughter will be treated at school in the future; luckily, my DH has already said he would take anything like the first story to be bullying and would go to the school to report such behavior. ….. AnnMarie
Oh, I should add that the second situation was in public, and the two woman had only just met. Also, while these two situations aren’t severe cases, if I’ve heard of two things like this in the last year in my neck of the woods there are surely others and worse ones. –AnnMarie
I meant to tell you that Dawkins was 1) in Kansas recently and 2) on The World last night on NPR.
sorry!
I always thought that we should respect other’s beliefs, be they religious or otherwise. Also, I would think that there are probably more hard scientists who believe in ‘God’ in the abstract than there are nonscientists. A lot of the sciences are based around various theories and models that must be believed in because there is no actual direct evidence that these theories or models are ‘real’. The whole model of the indivisible atom was constructed in order to explain certain observations in physics and chemistry. When observations showed that there were certain events that could not occur if an atom was indivisible then quantum physics was created as another model for the physical (albeit subatomic physical) world. Scientists have more practice than anyone in believing and having faith. The main difference between the scientific and the religious is that those in the former world have devised ways to measure the indirect effects of the theories in which they believe – if we were to work out a way of measuring the indirect effects of the theory of ‘God’ I wonder if we would stay with that particular theory or whether we would decide that some modifications were in order. The development of Islam and Christianity from the Hebrew beliefs would suggest that our models of ‘God’ are nearly as modifiable as the so called ‘scientific’ models – which is reassuring.
Does ‘inability to accept another’s beliefs’ necessarily correlate with levels of evangelism? I always thought an evangelist was someone who actively spread their beliefs. Actively spreading what one believes does not seem to me to necessitate a refusal to accept the beliefs of others. After all I could say ‘Well I accept that you believe a) but have you heard about b)? No? Well let me tell me a bit about b)’ Would I be an evangelist?