God in a box

Some thoughts on this topic have long been sinking to the bottom of my mental pending tray, but they were brought to the surface when I awoke on Saturday morning to a BBC World Service programme on science in the Vatican in which Professor Richard Dawkins was briefly interviewed. He summarised his objections to religion with the assertions that bad deeds have often been perpetrated in the name of religion (suicide bombers for example); that, although we did not know and perhaps could not know what happened in the first pica second after the moment of creation, it did not help our understanding to speculate about a personal god who answered our individual prayers (probably the white beard was not mentioned but we were in that territory); and that the proper, the profound reaction to the world in which we live was a sense of wonder.

Professor Dawkins ...

That reinforced my impression of Professor Dawkins as a man with no real curiosity about the nature of religious experience, an impoverished conception of art, and probably little understanding of political conflict and social organisation. That triple impression may have deterred me from giving Professor Dawkins’s ideas the attention they deserve, but, in the true spirit of the internet, I do not intend to let ignorance stand in the way of opinion.

... and acquaintance

To take the points in different order, I did once see a television programme with Professor Dawkins in discussion with like-minded people where he was at pains to explain that his atheistic belief (I think he actually, with intellectual nicety, characterised himself as an extreme agnostic) did not to any degree prevent him from appreciating religious art. He was, he said, capable of luxuriating in (perhaps it was wondering at, wonder seems to play a prominent role in his aesthetic and moral view) the beauty of a religious painting or piece of music (the B minor mass perhaps) without paying any attention to its inherent or explicit religious meaning – and then afterwards he came out of that reverie back to the real world, the world of evidence based understanding.

That idea of art is perhaps not so immediately seen as inadequate as it would have been in the time of F R Leavis, who formed (as some may guess, looking at the literary references on this blog) my approach to literature and art, but it plainly comes close to ‘art for art’s sake’, which is equally out of modern fashion, or, more interestingly, aligns Professor Dawkins somewhat with the judge in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who, thinking apparently that such a book might be all very well in the gentleman’s library or club, asked the members of the jury to consider whether they would be content to have their ‘wives or servants’ come across it.

Would you, Professor Dawkins, be content for your wife (I ask entirely hypothetically: I do not even know whether the Professor is married) to listen to the B minor mass, or your servants (college servants perhaps)? Well perhaps not they, but the lumpen mass that you find so depressingly prone to believe in the gentleman with the long white beard – they might be persuaded to religious belief by it, or have their belief confirmed, as I am sure many have.

I used to find it rather cheap and facile to compare ‘militant atheists’ with religious enthusiasts, but I was struck forcibly in the television discussion by how closely Professor Dawkins and his colleagues resembled the enforcers of religious orthodoxy in both manner and apparent motivation: these god-believing people were, to Professor Dawkins, strangely and pathetically in error; both for their own good and for the good of society they must be made to recant.

It becomes a social project. The tools of the inquisition are not to hand, but there is the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science whose 'mission ... is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering' and those buses proclaiming ‘There is, probably, no god’, despite the scrupulous qualifier, are as importunate and environmentally dreary as any wayside pulpit, and as hopelessly ineffective.



Looking for the evidence

The picture heading the official website is strangely reminiscent of popular and proselytising religious imagery, eyes cast aloft to the clouds, if not the heavens. One is almost tempted, an an act of cyber graffiti, to add the flowing white beard.

It is strange that anyone who conceives they have a social or intellectual duty to argue against religious belief should concentrate on the question, does god exist? To someone engaged in religious inquiry that must appear almost the last question that matters – if it matters at all. Isn’t that what all the fuss was about with the former Bishop of Durham?

The concerns of religious enquiry must be, ‘What is the true nature of existence?’; ‘How do I as an individual relate to it?’ and ‘How should one conduct one’s life to enhance that relationship?’

As the central character in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead puts it, if one conceives of god as the author of existence, what does it mean to ask, does god exist? He also remarks that almost nothing of value can be said about belief in god from a defensive position. I take him to mean that religious enquiry is a quest for understanding of something that is never likely to be directly grasped. Yet to ask whether ‘god exists’ one must posit a distinct conception, and whatever one chooses is likely to be inadequate or illogical so that the answer to the question whether it exists will almost certainly be, no. That, however, hardly exhausts the question, and, in any case, people embarked on Professor Dawkins’s enterprise seldom bother to engage with belief in its most artistically or intellectually accomplished forms. The most publicised recent debate on religion (available through the Dawkins Foundation website) was held between Christopher Hitchens and none other than that deep religious thinker Tony Blair. I rest my case.

The charge remains that some terrible things have been done in the name of religion. Professor Dawkins conceded only that some people ‘may’ have done good in the name of religion. Such a concession seems grudging to the point of stupidity. Inevitably someone motivated by their religious belief quietly to tend the sick or the poor will get less attention than the suicide bomber killing by the dozen, but to entertain the possibility that none such exist – well, you may think that, Professor, but no sensible man could possibly believe it.

There is research to show that suicide bombers are usually not particularly religiously devout, even in Islamic conflicts, and of course it was the avowedly non-religious Tamil Tigers who first developed suicide bombing.

Professor Dawkins is, I think, a little disingenuous in blaming religious belief, of itself, for all the horrors committed in its name. Until historically recently (and to some extent even now) all societies and states have had an avowedly religious affiliation, and it is organised human societies that have a propensity to barbarism, oppression and aggression. Modern secular states scarcely have a better record. Randolph Bourne, the early twentieth-century American writer, about whom I have posted before, has much of interest to say on that subject in War is the health of the state.

So, Professor Dawkins leaves me more puzzled than persuaded, and I find it a relief that his ideas and programme receive less attention than a while ago. I wonder what Richard Steele of the eighteenth-century Tatler and those polite gentlemen in the coffee house would have made of it.