I’ve been very critical* of Richard Dawkins’s recent Twitter dictats on abortion and Down syndrome, but now I get a chance to defend him, and from some of his own ardent supporters at that.
As you all no doubt know, he posted an apology plus explanation yesterday. What I want to take issue with here is not the post but a comment replying to a pair of comments pointing out the importance of emotions and persuasion in discussions of moral issues.
Do you have a list of topics at hand about which we should avoid talking logically? That would be most convenient for everyone concerned. Even if you can’t see the absurdity of that, consider that your list would differ from everyone else’s list of sensitive topics and we’d end up with very little that we could indeed discuss rationally.
You say that you marveled at the Blind Watchmaker and were thrilled by the God Delusion. Did you find them to be well balanced between rational argument and emotional sentiment? I, personally, did not find any patronizing emotional arguments in those two, and if there had been they would not only be unreadable, but insufferable. Why should your sensitivities trump those who are offended by analyzing religion too closely?
The comment is actually somewhat confusing: it’s not clear if the claim is that logic and emotion should be combined and “balanced,” or that emotion should be excluded. I think, though, in context and given those last two sentences, it’s the second. The claim seems to be that the two books were refreshingly free of emotional arguments. I want to defend Dawkins from that charge, at least when it comes to The God Delusion. That book was not free of emotion at all, nor should it have been. It has plenty of indignation, and rightly so.
It starts with emotion. The first sentence is emotional. Don’t you remember? It’s one of those memorable opening lines, like “It is a truth universally acknowledged…” or “All happy families are alike…”
As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave.
As you know, that sets up an analogy to our situation with regard to religion: many of us hate it and prefer to leave (or, having left long ago or never entered, to stay away).
This is about feeling. It’s far from purely logical, and it’s not even purely cognitive. It’s not just about truth. It’s about aversion. And that’s appropriate. We are what we are and not something else. We’re not machines, not even computing machines. We have emotions, and they matter. We rebel against mandatory or socially coerced religion because we dislike it.
This is not to say (as I have seen some bemused or hostile onlookers claim) that arguments should be all emotion and no logic. It’s just to say that emotion can’t and shouldn’t be excluded from discussions of moral issues. (Technical issues are another matter. Feel free to exclude emotions from discussion of bridge-building.)
More from that preface:
As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave.
Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this
unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But
darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my
text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’
I didn’t know I could.
I suspect – well, I am sure – that there are lots of people out there
who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy
in it, don’t believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in
its name; people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents’
religion and wish they could, but just don’t realize that leaving is an
option. If you are one of them, this book is for you.
You see? Indignation, sympathy, generosity, compassion. And those are good things.
*Note that that’s not a contravention of the joint statement on managing disagreement ethically. That was the whole point. We are going to disagree at times; that’s inevitable; we can’t possibly have or expect total agreement on every issue. We have to be able to do that without resorting to scorched earth tactics.
(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)