[MD] Terry Eagleton on Dawkin's God Delusion

[ian glendinning]

Hi MoQ'ers
Couldn't resist forwarding this from FoW ...

Take it away, Eagleton fans.

Ian

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Karl Rogers <>
Date: Jan 18, 2007 3:44 PM
Subject: Terry Eagleton on Dawkin's God Delusion
To: FRIENDSOFWISDOM at jiscmail.ac.uk


Some FoW members might be amused by this article:
Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching
Terry Eagleton
London Review of Books, October 2006

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the
subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of
what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying
rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional
atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least
well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don't
believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything
worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar
caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology
student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed
their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment
on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt
bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to
theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These
days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august
sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
Dawkins on God is rather like those right-wing Cambridge dons who
filed eagerly into the Senate House some years ago to non-placet
Jacques Derrida for an honorary degree. Very few of them, one
suspects, had read more than a few pages of his work, and even that
judgment might be excessively charitable. Yet they would doubtless
have been horrified to receive an essay on Hume from a student who had
not read his Treatise of Human Nature. There are always topics on
which otherwise scrupulous minds will cave in with scarcely a struggle
to the grossest prejudice. For a lot of academic psychologists, it is
Jacques Lacan; for Oxbridge philosophers it is Heidegger; for former
citizens of the Soviet bloc it is the writings of Marx; for militant
rationalists it is religion.

What, one wonders, are Dawkins's views on the epistemological
differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on
subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard
of them? Or does he imagine like a bumptious young barrister that you
can defeat the opposition while being complacently ignorant of its
toughest case? Dawkins, it appears, has sometimes been told by
theologians that he sets up straw men only to bowl them over, a charge
he rebuts in this book; but if The God Delusion is anything to go by,
they are absolutely right. As far as theology goes, Dawkins has an
enormous amount in common with Ian Paisley and American TV
evangelists. Both parties agree pretty much on what religion is; it's
just that Dawkins rejects it while Oral Roberts and his unctuous tribe
grow fat on it.

A molehill of instances out of a mountain of them will have to
suffice. Dawkins considers that all faith is blind faith, and that
Christian and Muslim children are brought up to believe
unquestioningly. Not even the dim-witted clerics who knocked me about
at grammar school thought that. For mainstream Christianity, reason,
argument and honest doubt have always played an integral role in
belief. (Where, given that he invites us at one point to question
everything, is Dawkins's own critique of science, objectivity,
liberalism, atheism and the like?) Reason, to be sure, doesn't go all
the way down for believers, but it doesn't for most sensitive,
civilised non-religious types either. Even Richard Dawkins lives more
by faith than by reason. We hold many beliefs that have no
unimpeachably rational justification, but are nonetheless reasonable
to entertain. Only positivists think that 'rational' means
'scientific'. Dawkins rejects the surely reasonable case that science
and religion are not in competition on the grounds that this insulates
religion from rational inquiry. But this is a mistake: to claim that
science and religion pose different questions to the world is not to
suggest that if the bones of Jesus were discovered in Palestine, the
pope should get himself down to the dole queue as fast as possible. It
is rather to claim that while faith, rather like love, must involve
factual knowledge, it is not reducible to it. For my claim to love you
to be coherent, I must be able to explain what it is about you that
justifies it; but my bank manager might agree with my dewy-eyed
description of you without being in love with you himself.

Dawkins holds that the existence or non-existence of God is a
scientific hypothesis which is open to rational demonstration.
Christianity teaches that to claim that there is a God must be
reasonable, but that this is not at all the same thing as faith.
Believing in God, whatever Dawkins might think, is not like concluding
that aliens or the tooth fairy exist. God is not a celestial
super-object or divine UFO, about whose existence we must remain
agnostic until all the evidence is in. Theologians do not believe that
he is either inside or outside the universe, as Dawkins thinks they
do. His transcendence and invisibility are part of what he is, which
is not the case with the Loch Ness monster. This is not to say that
religious people believe in a black hole, because they also consider
that God has revealed himself: not, as Dawkins thinks, in the guise of
a cosmic manufacturer even smarter than Dawkins himself (the New
Testament has next to nothing to say about God as Creator), but for
Christians at least, in the form of a reviled and murdered political
criminal. The Jews of the so-called Old Testament had faith in God,
but this does not mean that after debating the matter at a number of
international conferences they decided to endorse the scientific
hypothesis that there existed a supreme architect of the universe –
even though, as Genesis reveals, they were of this opinion. They had
faith in God in the sense that I have faith in you. They may well have
been mistaken in their view; but they were not mistaken because their
scientific hypothesis was unsound.

Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were
entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine
God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of
chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions
of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony
Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God
is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a
principle, an entity, or 'existent': in one sense of that word it
would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does
not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any
entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there
is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up
to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of
objects.
This, not some super-manufacturing, is what is traditionally meant by
the claim that God is Creator. He is what sustains all things in being
by his love; and this would still be the case even if the universe had
no beginning. To say that he brought it into being ex nihilo is not a
measure of how very clever he is, but to suggest that he did it out of
love rather than need. The world was not the consequence of an
inexorable chain of cause and effect. Like a Modernist work of art,
there is no necessity about it at all, and God might well have come to
regret his handiwork some aeons ago. The Creation is the original acte
gratuit. God is an artist who did it for the sheer love or hell of it,
not a scientist at work on a magnificently rational design that will
impress his research grant body no end.

Because the universe is God's, it shares in his life, which is the
life of freedom. This is why it works all by itself, and why science
and Richard Dawkins are therefore both possible. The same is true of
human beings: God is not an obstacle to our autonomy and enjoyment
but, as Aquinas argues, the power that allows us to be ourselves. Like
the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is
the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be
dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of
freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to
characterise the relation between God and humanity.

Dawkins, who is as obsessed with the mechanics of Creation as his
Creationist opponents, understands nothing of these traditional
doctrines. Nor does he understand that because God is transcendent of
us (which is another way of saying that he did not have to bring us
about), he is free of any neurotic need for us and wants simply to be
allowed to love us. Dawkins's God, by contrast, is Satanic. Satan
('accuser' in Hebrew) is the misrecognition of God as Big Daddy and
punitive judge, and Dawkins's God is precisely such a repulsive
superego. This false consciousness is overthrown in the person of
Jesus, who reveals the Father as friend and lover rather than judge.
Dawkins's Supreme Being is the God of those who seek to avert divine
wrath by sacrificing animals, being choosy in their diet and being
impeccably well behaved. They cannot accept the scandal that God loves
them just as they are, in all their moral shabbiness. This is one
reason St Paul remarks that the law is cursed. Dawkins sees
Christianity in terms of a narrowly legalistic notion of atonement –
of a brutally vindictive God sacrificing his own child in recompense
for being offended – and describes the belief as vicious and
obnoxious. It's a safe bet that the Archbishop of Canterbury couldn't
agree more. It was the imperial Roman state, not God, that murdered
Jesus.
Dawkins thinks it odd that Christians don't look eagerly forward to
death, given that they will thereby be ushered into paradise. He does
not see that Christianity, like most religious faiths, values human
life deeply, which is why the martyr differs from the suicide. The
suicide abandons life because it has become worthless; the martyr
surrenders his or her most precious possession for the ultimate
well-being of others. This act of self-giving is generally known as
sacrifice, a word that has unjustly accrued all sorts of politically
incorrect implications. Jesus, Dawkins speculates, might have desired
his own betrayal and death, a case the New Testament writers
deliberately seek to rebuff by including the Gethsemane scene, in
which Jesus is clearly panicking at the prospect of his impending
execution. They also put words into his mouth when he is on the cross
to make much the same point. Jesus did not die because he was mad or
masochistic, but because the Roman state and its assorted local
lackeys and running dogs took fright at his message of love, mercy and
justice, as well as at his enormous popularity with the poor, and did
away with him to forestall a mass uprising in a highly volatile
political situation. Several of Jesus' close comrades were probably
Zealots, members of an anti-imperialist underground movement. Judas'
surname suggests that he may have been one of them, which makes his
treachery rather more intelligible: perhaps he sold out his leader in
bitter disenchantment, recognising that he was not, after all, the
Messiah. Messiahs are not born in poverty; they do not spurn weapons
of destruction; and they tend to ride into the national capital in
bullet-proof limousines with police outriders, not on a donkey.

Jesus, who pace Dawkins did indeed 'derive his ethics from the
Scriptures' (he was a devout Jew, not the founder of a fancy new
set-up), was a joke of a Messiah. He was a carnivalesque parody of a
leader who understood, so it would appear, that any regime not founded
on solidarity with frailty and failure is bound to collapse under its
own hubris. The symbol of that failure was his crucifixion. In this
faith, he was true to the source of life he enigmatically called his
Father, who in the guise of the Old Testament Yahweh tells the Hebrews
that he hates their burnt offerings and that their incense stinks in
his nostrils. They will know him for what he is, he reminds them, when
they see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being
sent empty away. You are not allowed to make a fetish or graven image
of this God, since the only image of him is human flesh and blood.
Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and
welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the
rich. It is not a 'religious' affair at all, and demands no special
clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet. (The Catholic
prohibition on meat on Fridays is an unscriptural church regulation.)

Jesus hung out with whores and social outcasts, was remarkably casual
about sex, disapproved of the family (the suburban Dawkins is a trifle
queasy about this), urged us to be laid-back about property and
possessions, warned his followers that they too would die violently,
and insisted that the truth kills and divides as well as liberates. He
also cursed self-righteous prigs and deeply alarmed the ruling class.

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the
crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human
history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but
only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire
condition. This is known as the resurrection. Those who don't see this
dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history are
likely to be devotees of that bright-eyed superstition known as
infinite human progress, for which Dawkins is a full-blooded
apologist. Or they might be well-intentioned reformers or social
democrats, which from a Christian standpoint simply isn't radical
enough.

The central doctrine of Christianity, then, is not that God is a
bastard. It is, in the words of the late Dominican theologian Herbert
McCabe, that if you don't love you're dead, and if you do, they'll
kill you. Here, then, is your pie in the sky and opium of the people.
It was, of course, Marx who coined that last phrase; but Marx, who in
the same passage describes religion as the 'heart of a heartless
world, the soul of soulless conditions', was rather more judicious and
dialectical in his judgment on it than the lunging, flailing,
mispunching Dawkins.

Now it may well be that all this is no more plausible than the tooth
fairy. Most reasoning people these days will see excellent grounds to
reject it. But critics of the richest, most enduring form of popular
culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case
at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on
the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook. The
mainstream theology I have just outlined may well not be true; but
anyone who holds it is in my view to be respected, whereas Dawkins
considers that no religious belief, anytime or anywhere, is worthy of
any respect whatsoever. This, one might note, is the opinion of a man
deeply averse to dogmatism. Even moderate religious views, he insists,
are to be ferociously contested, since they can always lead to
fanaticism.

Some currents of the liberalism that Dawkins espouses have nowadays
degenerated into a rather nasty brand of neo-liberalism, but in my
view this is no reason not to champion liberalism. In some obscure
way, Dawkins manages to imply that the Bishop of Oxford is responsible
for Osama bin Laden. His polemic would come rather more convincingly
from a man who was a little less arrogantly triumphalistic about
science (there are a mere one or two gestures in the book to its
fallibility), and who could refrain from writing sentences like 'this
objection [to a particular scientific view] can be answered by the
suggestion . . . that there are many universes,' as though a
suggestion constituted a scientific rebuttal. On the horrors that
science and technology have wreaked on humanity, he is predictably
silent. Yet the Apocalypse is far more likely to be the product of
them than the work of religion. Swap you the Inquisition for chemical
warfare.

Such is Dawkins's unruffled scientific impartiality that in a book of
almost four hundred pages, he can scarcely bring himself to concede
that a single human benefit has flowed from religious faith, a view
which is as a priori improbable as it is empirically false. The
countless millions who have devoted their lives selflessly to the
service of others in the name of Christ or Buddha or Allah are wiped
from human history – and this by a self-appointed crusader against
bigotry. He is like a man who equates socialism with the Gulag. Like
the puritan and sex, Dawkins sees God everywhere, even where he is
self-evidently absent. He thinks, for example, that the
ethno-political conflict in Northern Ireland would evaporate if
religion did, which to someone like me, who lives there part of the
time, betrays just how little he knows about it. He also thinks rather
strangely that the terms Loyalist and Nationalist are 'euphemisms' for
Protestant and Catholic, and clearly doesn't know the difference
between a Loyalist and a Unionist or a Nationalist and a Republican.
He also holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that
Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than politics.
These are not just the views of an enraged atheist. They are the
opinions of a readily identifiable kind of English middle-class
liberal rationalist. Reading Dawkins, who occasionally writes as
though 'Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness' is a mighty funny
way to describe a Grecian urn, one can be reasonably certain that he
would not be Europe's greatest enthusiast for Foucault,
psychoanalysis, agitprop, Dadaism, anarchism or separatist feminism.
All of these phenomena, one imagines, would be as distasteful to his
brisk, bloodless rationality as the virgin birth. Yet one can of
course be an atheist and a fervent fan of them all. His God-hating,
then, is by no means simply the view of a scientist admirably cleansed
of prejudice. It belongs to a specific cultural context. One would not
expect to muster many votes for either anarchism or the virgin birth
in North Oxford. (I should point out that I use the term North Oxford
in an ideological rather than geographical sense. Dawkins may be
relieved to know that I don't actually know where he lives.)
There is a very English brand of common sense that believes mostly in
what it can touch, weigh and taste, and The God Delusion springs from,
among other places, that particular stable. At its most philistine and
provincial, it makes Dick Cheney sound like Thomas Mann. The secular
Ten Commandments that Dawkins commends to us, one of which advises us
to enjoy our sex lives so long as they don't damage others, are for
the most part liberal platitudes. Dawkins quite rightly detests
fundamentalists; but as far as I know his anti-religious diatribes
have never been matched in his work by a critique of the global
capitalism that generates the hatred, anxiety, insecurity and sense of
humiliation that breed fundamentalism. Instead, as the obtuse media
chatter has it, it's all down to religion.
It thus comes as no surprise that Dawkins turns out to be an
old-fashioned Hegelian when it comes to global politics, believing in
a zeitgeist (his own term) involving ever increasing progress, with
just the occasional 'reversal'. 'The whole wave,' he rhapsodises in
the finest Whiggish manner, 'keeps moving.' There are, he generously
concedes, 'local and temporary setbacks' like the present US
government – as though that regime were an electoral aberration,
rather than the harbinger of a drastic transformation of the world
order that we will probably have to live with for as long as we can
foresee. Dawkins, by contrast, believes, in his Herbert Spencerish
way, that 'the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will
continue.' So there we are, then: we have it from the mouth of Mr
Public Science himself that aside from a few local, temporary hiccups
like ecological disasters, famine, ethnic wars and nuclear wastelands,
History is perpetually on the up.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to 'sophisticated'
religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist
religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it
is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by
implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass. The huge
numbers of believers who hold something like the theology I outlined
above can thus be conveniently lumped with rednecks who murder
abortionists and malign homosexuals. As far as such outrages go,
however, The God Delusion does a very fine job indeed. The two most
deadly texts on the planet, apart perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld's
emails, are the Bible and the Koran; and Dawkins, as one the best of
liberals as well as one of the worst, has done a magnificent job over
the years of speaking out against that particular strain of
psychopathology known as fundamentalism, whether Texan or Taliban. He
is right to repudiate the brand of mealy-mouthed liberalism which
believes that one has to respect other people's silly or obnoxious
ideas just because they are other people's. In its admirably angry
way, The God Delusion argues that the status of atheists in the US is
nowadays about the same as that of gays fifty years ago. The book is
full of vivid vignettes of the sheer horrors of religion,
fundamentalist or otherwise. Nearly 50 per cent of Americans believe
that a glorious Second Coming is imminent, and some of them are doing
their damnedest to bring it about. But Dawkins could have told us all
this without being so appallingly bitchy about those of his scientific
colleagues who disagree with him, and without being so theologically
illiterate. He might also have avoided being the second most
frequently mentioned individual in his book – if you count God as an
individual.

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