Entries associated with the tag "Richard Dawkins":

Freakonomics coauthor Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago doesn't know what he doesn't know, and publicly admits to being bewildered by how The God Delusion could be a best-seller:

"I understand why books attacking liberals sell. It is because many conservatives hate liberals. Books attacking conservatives sell for the same reason. But no one writes books saying that bird watching is a waste of time, because people who aren’t bird watchers probably agree, but don’t want to spend $20 in order to read about it. Since very few people (at least in my crowd) actively dislike God, I’m surprised that anti-God books are not received with the same yawn that anti-bird watcher books would be."

Does he think that it's unbelievers who deny evolution and try to stop stem-cell research? Does he think those maniacs with box cutters on 9/11 were secularists?

No, it's not Robert Ludlum, it's Richard Dawkins. He mocked a British comic who professes belief in some sort of supreme being because he finds it "very comforting." The excellent Jessa Crispin of Bookslut is so fed up with Dawkins that she threatens to start believing in God herself. (Original story here.)

Dawkins was surely impolite to point out the foolishness. (My take on his book is here.) But was he wrong? Many years ago when I lived downstate, I drove my pickup to work piled high with miscellaneous junk tied on in various improvised ways. Someone at work commented that my load was "n----- rigged." (Trust me, ironic appropriation was not involved.)

I've always felt bad that I didn't call him out then and there. It would have been impolite, but there are times when impolite is right. When a Bush flunky says, "We create our own reality," it's good to point out that he's a moron. When someone says it makes sense to believe something because it's "comfortable," why should they be given a free pass?

That's not a rhetorical question. When and where do you say the impolite truth? Or, the other way: when and where do you wish you'd done a Dawkins?

Blogging has opened up a surprisingly leisurely and thorough subgenre of criticism -- I wouldn't call it "fisking" because it's more civil, but it's related. One good example I've seen is over at Higgaion, where Christopher Heard is reading (actually, listening to) Richard Dawkins's best-seller The God Delusion and making astute commentary. If you're like me -- interested in the book but unlikely to have time to read it -- Heard's critique is clear and detailed and seems unaffected by his ultimate allegiance. No other review I've seen comes close to this one in quality, at least as far as it goes. And because it's so thorough it also puts the question to those who defend Dawkins's every move, no matter how foolish.

Here's part of Heard's commentary on Chapter 3, Part 1:

"At this point in the chapter, Dawkins pauses to take a swipe at the concepts of omniscience and omnipotence. Before analyzing Dawkins’s comments, I should reveal that I have no great love for either term. The concepts of omniscience and ominpotence are, from my point of view as a student of the Hebrew Bible, Johnny-come-latelies who have little to do with the biblical portrayal of God.... With that bias out on the table, you will understand why I am not going to try to defend the concepts of omnipotence and omniscience as such against Dawkins’s snarky 'critique.'

"Neither, however, am I going to affirm that Dawkins has put forward a strong critique of either notion. He hasn’t (at least, not at this point in chapter 3). Dawkins’s entire aside consists of a thin claim that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. 'If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can’t change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent' (2:38:26). That’s the entire substance of Dawkins’s argument against these concepts (at least by this point in chapter 3). It is by no means incumbent upon Dawkins to oppose these concepts at all in order to disprove (or stack up large probabilities against) the God Hypothesis, since the God Hypothesis as Dawkins has stated it does not apply either label, much less both, to the creative intelligence that it does posit. Here again we have a red herring. On the other hand, if Dawkins is going to take swipes at specific theological dogmas, he needs to understand them.

"The philosophical-theological literature teems with controversy over just how omnipotence and omniscience are to be understood. The incompatibility that Dawkins asserts is only a genuine incompatibility if one defines omniscience as a factual knowledge of every actual state of affairs, past, present, and future, and if one defines omnipotence simply as the power to do anything at all. Some theologians have written entire books objecting to one, the other, or both of these simplistic definitions."

Way too many unbelievers in the blogosphere respond like party hacks when faced with this sort of criticism.  Most guilty is PZ Meyers of the popular blog Pharyngula, whose forte is shooting creationist fish in a barrel. Equally disappointing, though more polite, have been Mark Trodden at Cosmic Variance and Jason Rosenhouse at EvolutionBlog. (These bloggers were responding to short published reviews that made the same point, though perhaps not as clearly; to my knowledge none of them has paid Heard any attention, but I could've missed it.)

PZ Meyers asks, "Why the hell should anyone have to take the frilly excuses of theology seriously?" If you're convinced (as he is) that religion is evil and should be eradicated, then you have to undertake the same unpleasant task that you would if you sought to eradicate the uncritical worship of George W. Bush. You have to understand why and how it happens. Randomly thundering against it in general, focusing on side issues instead of the main one (and misunderstanding them), and claiming you don't need to know anything about it, are unproductive strategies. They're unproductive in themselves, and they make even sympathetic observers conclude that you're not serious.

America may or may not be a Christian nation, but two atheist manifestoes are on the best-seller lists: Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation and Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Michael Conlon reports on this phenomenon from Chicago, quoting Wheaton College theologian Timothy Larsen: "Some of these are people we wounded that we should be handling pastorally rather than with aggressive knockdown debate." His condescension is no more palatable than Dawkins's predictable sneers.

Conlon quotes both sides, but they're just pushing their beliefs or unbeliefs. No one's looking for evidence wherever it leads -- the only person I know of who does that is NYU's Thomas Nagel. He cemented his status as my favorite philosopher with a sophisticated takedown of Dawkins in the New Republic (subscription only; text also available here).

The key question is whence came design in nature. Dawkins says God's no explanation, because then you have to explain God. But on this field Nagel is a pro and Dawkins is an amateur: "All explanations come to an end somewhere," explains Nagel, since Dawkins evidently didn't do the reading. "On either view [Dawkins's secularism or the God hypothesis], the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics."

Having laid out the rules of the match, Nagel finds that the God hypothesis loses round one, since "the theory of evolution through heritable variation and natural selection" explains how intricate designs such as the eye can come about naturally, and hence these designs no longer provide evidence for the God hypothesis.

But round two is still being fought out, because the evolutionary process is undergirded by DNA. And since DNA itself can't have evolved, where did it come from? "At this point the origin of life remains, in light of what is known about the huge size, the extreme specificity, and the exquisite functional precision of the genetic material, a mystery -- an event that could not have occurred by chance and to which no significant probability can be assigned on the basis of what we know of the laws of physics and chemistry."

Of course that could change, and likely will if we can keep the theocrats at bay and dispassionate biological research going. (BTW, Nagel isn't buying Dawkins's idea that everything can be reduced to physics in any case.  No matter what anyone says, your own experience of being aware isn't the same thing as neurons firing in the brain. Some things are just . . .  different.)

Even if the God hypothesis were confirmed, it offers little comfort to believers. Nagel delivers the throwaway line early: "The purposes of such a [hypothetical] creator remain obscure, given what we know about the world." On the New Republic site, commenter jhildner did a nice job of unpacking this:

"Does it follow from this alleged act of creation that the creator continues to exert influence over events? That it is one force and not many? That is is a benevolent force? That it still exists today? That it has desires as well as agency? There's a fun Simpsons Halloween special in which Lisa unintentionally creates a minature civilization by placing a tooth in a container of soda for a school science project, and the minature people think she's God. Can our dispassionate observer rule out the possibility that the universe is an alien's science project? Can he reasonably infer that any tenet of any major religion is factually true? I don't think so."

Unfortunately, the fate of honest inquirers like Nagel is to be selectively quoted and used by religionists like Stephen Barr at First Things -- or, worse, evolution deniers -- to prop up their dogma. George Orwell, call your office.

(Two much-discussed Dawkins reviews are Jim Holt's in the New York Times and Terry Eagleton's in the London Review of Books.)

Andrew Brown reads Richard Dawkins's new book, The God Delusion, so we don't have to:

"In his broad thesis, Dawkins is right. Religions are potentially dangerous, and in their popular forms profoundly irrational. The agnostics must be right and the atheists very well may be. There is no purpose to the universe. Nothing inconsistent with the laws of physics has been reliably reported. To demand a designer to explain the complexity of the world begs the question, 'Who designed the designer?' It has been clear since Darwin that we have no need to hypothesize a designer to explain the complexity of living things. The results of intercessory prayer are indistinguishable from those of chance."

Brown still finds the book pretty worthless--in part because all this was old news in the 19th century, yet as we advance with trepidation through the 21st, religious belief and practice continue and, if anything, appear to intensify. Dawkins is in the same leaky boat as Sam Harris (The End of Faith, reviewed in the Reader Nov. 12, 2004). Neither can explain the persistence of supernaturalism. Their only response is to pound harder on the same old Victorian table.

Daniel Dennett took some interesting pokes at this mystery recently in Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Nice try, but MRN (more research needed).