Fundamentalist Dawkinsism
I see that Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is presenting a new Channel 4 series starting tomorrow entitled Root of all Evil?
This short series aims to challenges what Dawkins describes as ‘a process of non-thinking called faith’. According to the Channel 4 material, Dawkins:
“describes his astonishment that, at the start of the 21st century, religious faith is gaining ground in the face of rational, scientific truth. Science, based on scepticism, investigation and evidence, must continuously test its own concepts and claims. Faith, by definition, defies evidence: it is untested and unshakeable, and is therefore in direct contradiction with science.”
I have enormous respect for Dawkins as a scientist and intellectual, and I agree with some of his ideas. I too find fundamentalism frightening and dangerous, whether it comes from the Abrahamic religions or from scientific rationalism. But I don’t throw out faith completely. A more realistic faith embraces uncertainty, encourages debate and dissension, and provides space for people to explore the spiritual aspect to their lives. This usually ends up being much more challenging than following a fundamentalist rulebook.
I also agree with Dawkins that faith schools are a bad idea, contributing to sectarianism. Growing up in Ireland in the 1970s, I didn’t have any opportunity to make friends with Catholics until I went to university - and 17 years of segregation takes a long time to overcome. But education is not the only contributor to sectarian attitudes, so should not receive all the blame.
Madeleine Bunting wrote an interesting critique of Dawkins in yesterday’s Guardian. It has become fashionable among left-leaning Guardian-reading types (i.e. people like me) to dismiss all religion and faith (see Polly Toynbee’s polemic on the Narnia film), so it is encouraging to see a more balanced debate.
I hope that Dawkins’ programmes will encourage more debate, and that people who hold a Christian faith (and others) will engage further.
Update 16/01/2005:
This blog post was quoted in The Guardian on Saturday 14 January - Saturday Web page (p32, main section).
I’m on the fence wrt faith schools. I went to a Christian one in my secondary years. It was still in the throes of settling down and I missed out on some fundamental teaching but it’s a lot better now. Having said that I certainly didn’t see sending C and R to the Christian School here as a viable option. Mind you, it only has about 5 kids per year so that didn’t help.
I’m looking forward to hearing Dawkins, but I think his views are likely to harden those of fundamentalists, reducing dialogue and further increasing ’sectarianism’, rather than increasing engagement as you hope John. I can imagine pretty clearly what many of my church friends will have to say - without hearing a word of what Dawkins has to say.
This is timely coming just after the conclusion of the Dover trial. However, I don’t think even Dawkins can win over fundamentalists, just as creationists will simply ignore evidence and change tack again in the battle over America’s education system.
I’m with you on faith schools, especially where they are state funded. It is a parent’s responsibility to educate a child, especially in matters of faith.
I’ll bet it wasn’t easy for you to befriend Catholics at QUB.
It’s easy to pick a fight with fundamentalists.
Maybe the conversation that Dawkins needs to have is with Christians (and Jews, Hindus, Muslims and others) whose faith has the capacity to deal with a complex world, incorporating both the evidence of science and the diverse nature of biblical literature (poetry, wisdom, history, prophecy).
I just heard an interview with Dawkins on Radio Ulster Talk Back. Wasn’t that impressed with his reasoning, especially the thought that religion causes conflict in Northern Ireland, India/Packistan, African Nations; this is discounting that most of these countries are ex-colonial countries, and the conflict comes from that (according to Jerimy Harding anyway). He just sounded like a pompus english man (no offence to non-pompus englishmen).
I work with kids who attend intergrated schools, and it does not make a difference to there views. The Catholic in the classroom is a person, the catholics getting off the bus are the enemy. There is a strict distinction between the persona nd the group. It is not a bad option, but don’t expect it to be an panacea.
So, I’ve just watched the first episode.
I can see Dawkins’ problem. He exposes himself to the mad fundamentalists of all creeds, and comes across some incredible and offensive attitudes and beliefs.
He doesn’t encounter the reasonable, thinking and rational people of faith who feel exactly the same repulsion of bigoted views that he does. He doesn’t encounter the people of faith (Norman Kember, Desmond Tutu, Christian Aid workers etc.) who are trying to make the world a better place through a faith-influenced compassion. He doesn’t encounter the people of faith who question their beliefs and weigh up the evidence of their own experience.
I think Dawkins is looking for evidence that backs up his own prejudices and opinions, and is not taking a wider view that might show that the extremists are actually that, extreme.
Mm, I agree, but Dawkins’ point is that extremists are ultimately backed up by the whole culture of moderate religion, that ‘faith’, belief without evidence, is dangerous because it removes the need for evidence, or thought at at all.
I’m not convinced, however, that problems such as these are exclusively religious. The examples of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot come to mind.
I think people like the ones he met are as dangerous as he fears. How did he not give that pastor a smack for arrogantly telling him off for arrogance! (Maybe he did, and that’s why he was chased?!) That pastor and his church were as ‘normal’ as many I’ve encountered…
Much of the critique of Dawkin’s programme(s) falls into the fuzzy ‘equal time’ kind of trap that risked letting the literalist Creationists loose in US schools. For militant atheists like him (or me, I guess) the full consequences of the irrationality that is the prequisite of faith lead us to deny the sop of being diffident (?’respectful’) as is traditional. That religious faith is taking an unconscionable time ‘a dying’ is understandable because it a cultural tradition of such long standing, but longevity alone is not a compelling reason to offer respect. Dawkins is right that acceptance, either active or passive, of faith-fed world views is positively dangerous (’the root of evil’) , as well as an affront to indubitable human intellectual progress as epitomised in modern science. Some of the more arcane and ludicrous articles of faith have indeed tended to soften amongst ’sophisticated’ western people, but softening alone is just not good enough. Wilfully misleading oneself, and as programme 2 will be showing, one’s children, or those of other people, sanctions a long and slippery slope that certainly has positive evil at its lower end. Too long it has been argued amongst those somewhere on the faith-slope that it is just those farther down who are misled, misunderstand god’s message and that that is why they cling to flat-earth, witch-burning, spell-weaving, curse-laying aspects of the discredited faith of earlier times. But Dawkins’ thesis is positive: those anywhere on this slope need to look up it and see a place where - if sweet reason prevailed - they can be entirely freed of the intellectual, cultural and emotional ‘faith-gravity’ that keeps them on the slide at all.
The particular type of not-sense described as faith is best understood as a combination of accidents of birth, broader cultural baggage, political expediency (why was the Roman Empire abruptly Christian?) compounded by an intellectual laziness or indifference to evidence which some actually seem to relish. How rare, and thus how telling, is it that a child’s faith is not that of its parents: isn’t it just too obvious that religion is essentially a sexually transmitted disease? All the immensely sophisticated intellectual effort of theology seems to ignore this rather stark fact. Counting angels on the head of a pin is only quantitatively more daft than deciding about bodily assumption, the doctrine of the Trinity or whether St Thomas’ gospel really should have been in the New Testament. If the Bhuddists are actually right, or the Hindus or whoever, why bother with the details of the Pope’s claim to infallibility or Ian Paisley’s denial of the Bishop of Rome? That very smart people have bent their terrific intellects to these pseudo-questions does not make them valid questions.
Dawkins’ thesis is that faith is not just a benign cultural artefact (’mostly harmless’ in Douglas Adam’s two-word Hitchhiker’s Guide summary of planet earth!) and I agree. The engine for so much that is negative in society and between societies is variously initiated, accelerated, fuelled and expanded because of the power of the unreason of religious faith.
There is such a mountain of improbability (to misuse Dawkins’ marvellous metaphor – though one that didn’t work in the programme IMHO) to faith that one hardly knows where to start. Dawkins seems to be sticking to the Abrahamic god shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims (would that even they acknowledged its sharing better). You cannot ignore the fact that, if he had tried to run this programme in our culture 400 years ago, he would have gone to the stake. At what point in the slow untangling of the (old?/original?/fundamental?) articles of faith and subservience to unreason do present-day believers think we should stop? It should seem clear, with a little reflection, that another 3-400 years is unlikely to leave anything of the mystical, superstitious, miraculous, vague god concepts that a modern, sophisticated believer currently defends. The theological gulf between today and 1600 should serve as a message to current believers; those of us enlightened (by the Enlightenment!) are having a long wait whilst the remnants of the old baggage are discarded.
(Wo)Men certainly created gods in their own images. As Man’s image of herself advances, there is no room for, or need of, the baggage of our human intellectual childhood lingering on from hundreds and thousands of years ago. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Belzebub and baby Jesus are bound to come to occupy the same mental space – a purely metaphorical space – for ever more people. But Dawkins is right to express concern that, as at many times in history, unreason is on the march again. That is why atheists can’t just patronisingly tolerate the persistence of faith. Those near enough to the top of the slope of faith must be helped and encouraged to escape up and away to reason. ‘Being reasonable’ is surely something to aspire to!