Who You Calling Crude, Bub?
There was this interview with Alister McGrath last spring, all about how wrong Richard Dawkins is and how weak his arguments are. It’s rather puzzling.
But by the time you get to A Devil’s Chaplain, what we have is a very crude religious propagandist, only loosely connected with the whole scientific culture…It seems to me, he has a real animus against religion, but I’m unable to identify any single factor that seems to be a legitimate explanation of that hostility.
That’s puzzling, because, one, Dawkins (of course) is not a religious propagandist, that’s just the usual silly – and crude – religious rhetoric that pretends religion and non-religion are both religion, theism and non-theism are both theism. Two, because I would say McGrath is the crude one, based on what I’ve read of him, which tends to be short on argument and very long on assertion. Third, what is the nonsense about being unable to identify any single factor that would explain Dawkins’ dislike of religion? Well I suppose it’s that McGrath is so convinced that there’s no good reason to be hostile to religion that he can’t recognize reasons when he sees them. Which is a pretty crude way to think, frankly.
Dawkins seems to assume that his audience is completely ignorant of religion and, therefore, will accept his inadequate characterizations of religion as being accurate…And really, one of the things I find so distressing and so puzzling in reading him was that his actual knowledge of religion is very slight. He knows he doesn’t like it, but he seems to have a very shallow understanding, for example, of what religious people mean by the word “faith.”
Okay – what do they mean then? Go on, explain it to us – give us the deep version. Go on.
But he doesn’t do that.
The reason that Richard Dawkins has become so influential is that his rather strident, rather aggressive views resonate with what quite a lot of people hope is indeed the case.
Oh right! And your views don’t! Religion has nothing whatever to do with wishful thinking! Puh-leeze.
Altogether, not a very impressive performance.
‘Presumably evolution is not working?’
Just the easy bits, giraffes and finches. The hard stuff, that’s God.
Funny that when people (even religious people) want to insult scientists, they compare them to a priesthood, or say that science is just another religion.
How is it no-one who wants to insult priests accuses them of being just another bunch of scientists?
Perhaps at some deep level the defenders of religion recognise the weakness of their case, and can only defend it by trying to drag science down to the same level.
McGrath describes this as a good and reliable definition of faith on page 86 of his recent book, “Dawkins’ God”. It’s from WH Griffith Thomas:
“[Faith] affects the whole of man’s nature. It commences with the conviction of the mind based on adequate evidence; it continues in the confidence of the heart or emotions based on conviction, and is crowned in the consent of the will, by means of which the conviction and confidence are expressed in conduct.”
His note in the back reads: “Faith thus includes ‘the certainty of evidence’ and the ‘certainty of adherence’; it is not ‘blind but intelligent’.”
From this it would appear he hasn’t read Jamie Whyte’s book on “Clear Thinking”.
I rushed to find the book mentioned Alun; it’s actual titles are ‘Bad Thinking’ OR ‘Crimes against Logic’ for the US and UK. Sounds good in the reviews.
” The reason that Richard Dawkins has become so influential is that his rather strident, rather aggressive views resonate with what quite a lot of people hope is indeed the case.”
This reminds me so much of arguing gun control. Dawkins (who rules IMHO) seems, from the tone of his writing, to have lost patience with playing nice for people who just don’t seem to BLOODY LISTEN!
In the gun control debate, this just lets people discount you as strident, aggressive and dangerous. It appears to be happening that way for atheism too.
Damn, why do we have to tolerate idiots? Or more accurately, why do perfectly intelligent people not practice intellectual consistency???
(So slap me…)
I’ve often had the same thought as Harry above, except I’ve always perceived it as even more absurd than the way he puts it. Doesn’t it, after all, amount to the religious saying “Let’s make the atheists look really silly, so people will prefer us. How can we do that? I’ve got it! Let’s say they’re like us!”? I know in most cases it’s more like “they’re no better than us” to try to put religion and science on an equal footing, but there is that aspect, too.
Re: ChrisPer’s second comment: it’s not just that Dawkins seems to have lost patience from the tone of his writing, I think he was quite explicit in his post-9/11 piece about the faith-guided missile that it was time to take the gloves off and keep them off, i.e. we cannot afford any more pussy-footing around the real point. And blaming a certain fringe element of fundamentalist Islam is doing precisely that; religion in general is what makes such horrors possible and it needs to be said openly, forcefully and frequently. Anything else is capitulation and has the immediate effect of capitulation (see the previous Comment, “Deeply Cherished Dogmatism”).
Actually ‘bad thoughts; a guide to clear thinking’.
It is very good. It’s unapologetic in its harsh dealing with faith. I think it’s a mark of how established religious correctness is that something so straightforward can come across as quite naughty (to me).
Alun wrote:
‘His note in the back reads: “Faith thus includes ‘the certainty of evidence’ and the ‘certainty of adherence’; it is not ‘blind but intelligent’.”‘
How many errors does this contain?
1) The well known fallacy of composition (http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/composition.html), where characteristics of a part of something are assumed to be true for the whole.
2) The fallacy of equivocation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation), because the certainty involved in “the certainty of evidence” is not the same sort of thing involved in “the certainty of adherence”, whatever that is.
3) The fallacy of irrelevant conclusion: even if faith contains a lot of valid things, it does not follow they have been combined in an “intelligent” way.