What happens when your favorite atheist takes on your least favorite? I found out on Sunday, when The New Republic published John Gray’s scathing review of the first volume (!) of Richard Dawkins’ autobiography, An Appetite For Wonder. The pummeling Gray gives is so complete that the Samaritan in me is (almost) ready to stick up for poor Richard. That is, if my appetite for self-justification wasn’t so busy gorging itself on all the zingers. Suffice it to say, anyone who’s been picking up the sense over the past few months that the ‘atheist establishment’ considers Dawkins to be an embarrassment will find themselves vindicated in the extreme. Dawkins may be a remarkably easy target at this point, but if you only read one takedown, this is the one. The hyper-inflated anthropology, the intellectual vacuity, the aggressively misplaced veneration of information qua information, the unrepentant snobbery, the transparent juvenelia, the complete lack of self-awareness (or curiosity) esp in relation to his idol Darwin, Gray leaves no stone unturned. Maybe it’s just because Gone Girl is in theaters, but surely I’m not the only one who hears something, well, sociopathic in a few of the anecdotes that Gray relays from Dawkins (vis-a-vis bullying)? That would certainly explain the man’s superhuman certitude. Whatever the case, we have the ‘not-that-kind of Christian’ and the ‘not-that-kind of Muslim’, now we have the ‘not-that-kind of Atheist’. Gray being Gray, though, he cannot resist sticking up for a few of the theistic notions that Dawkins so arrogantly caricatures. The whole thing is worth your time. The final paragraph, not included below, closes with a truly masterful put-down. Lord have mercy on us all:
It is Dawkins’s identification with Darwin that is most incongruous. No two minds could be less alike than those of the great nineteenth-century scientist and the latter-day evangelist for atheism. Hesitant, doubtful, and often painfully perplexed, Darwin understood science as an empirical investigation in which truth is never self-evident and theories are always provisional. If science, for Darwin, was a method of inquiry that enabled him to edge tentatively and humbly toward the truth, for Dawkins, science is an unquestioned view of the world. The Victorians are often mocked for their supposed certainties, when in fact many of them (Darwin not least) were beset by anxieties and uncertainties. Dawkins, by contrast, seems never to doubt for a moment the capacity of the human mind—his own, at any rate—to resolve questions that previous generations have found insoluble…
What is striking is the commonplace quality of Dawkins’s rebellion against religion. In turning away from the milk-and-water Anglicanism in which he had been reared—after his conversion from theism, he “refused to kneel in chapel,” he writes proudly—he was doing what tens of thousands of Britain’s young people did at the time. Compulsory religious instruction of the kind that exists in British schools, it has often been observed, creates a fertile environment for atheism. Dawkins’s career illustrates the soundness of this truism. If there is anything remarkable in his adolescent rebellion, it is that he has remained stuck in it…
Even more remarkable is Dawkins’s inveterate literal-mindedness. He tells us that “the Pauline belief that everybody is born in sin, inherited from Adam (whose embarrassing non-existence was unknown to St. Paul), is one of the very nastiest aspects of Christianity.” It is true that the idea of original sin has become one with a morbid preoccupation with sexuality, which has been part of Christianity throughout much of its history. Even so, it is an idea that contains a vital truth: evil is not error, a mistake of the mind, a failure of understanding that can be corrected by smarter thinking. It is something deeper and more constitutive of human life itself. The capacity and propensity for destruction goes with being human. One does not have to be religious to acknowledge this dark fact…
Dawkins knows practically nothing of the philosophy of science, still less about theology or the history of religion. From his point of view, he has no need to know. He can deduce everything he wants to say from first principles. Religion is a type of supernatural belief, which is irrational, and we will all be better off without it: for all its paraphernalia of evolution and memes, this is the sum total of Dawkins’s argument for atheism. His attack on religion has a crudity that would make a militant Victorian unbeliever such as T.H. Huxley—described by his contemporaries as “Darwin’s bulldog” because he was so fierce in his defense of evolution—blush scarlet with embarrassment…
One might wager a decent sum of money that it has never occurred to Dawkins that to many people he appears as a comic figure. His default mode is one of rational indignation—a stance of withering patrician disdain for the untutored mind of a kind one might expect in a schoolmaster in a minor public school sometime in the 1930s. He seems to have no suspicion that any of those he despises could find his stilted pose of indignant rationality merely laughable. “I am not a good observer,” he writes modestly…
To suppose that science can liberate humankind from ignorance requires considerable credulity. We know how science has been used in the past—not only to alleviate the human lot, but equally to serve tyranny and oppression. The notion that things might be fundamentally different in the future is an act of faith—one as gratuitous as any of the claims of religion, if not more so. Consider Pascal. One of the founders of modern probability theory and the designer of the world’s first mass-transit system, he was far too intelligent to imagine that human reason could resolve perennial questions. His celebrated wager has always seemed to me a rather bad bet. Since we cannot know what gods there may be (if any), why stake our lives on pleasing one of them? But Pascal’s wager was meant as a pedagogical device rather than a demonstrative argument, and he reached faith himself by way of skeptical doubt. In contrast, Dawkins shows not a trace of skepticism anywhere in his writings. In comparison with Pascal, a man of restless intellectual energy, Dawkins is a monument to unthinking certitude.
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3 responses to “The Smartest Evisceration of Richard Dawkins You’ll Read (Today)”
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Delicious, I just love this stuff, I admit it. I almost feel guilty about it. Reminds of of David Berlinski’s wonderful book “The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions “. Dawkins is such an easy target, but atheists still seem to flock to him for some kind of refuge.
I went and read ‘the closed mind of Richard Dawkins” on my lunch break and found it to be a waste of time, like most writing about Dawkins. Personally I dislike Dawkins myself, I find him to be a humorless prick. But a lot of intellectually lazy writers think that because nobody with social skills will defend Dawkins, they can use him as a corner to peel away at the scientific method and Darwinism. This is not correct. The author John Gray often makes the same arguments that a 12 year old creationist does in biology class… “If evolution is just a theory where do you get off acting so sure about things?”. Not only does that mean the author does not understand what science or a theory is, but he completely discounts how the theory of evolution can make consistent predictions about flora and fauna by filling in gaps in ecosystems or analyzing which traits have survived in animals. This often comes from a place of insecurity inhabited by philosophers. The vast majority of philosophies depend heavily on just being a ‘colored lens to view the world’ that cannot be subjected to any objectivity. They get offended when scientists say “I dont have time for that crap” and choose to look at the world with telescopes and microscopes instead. So instead of focusing on evidence we should focus on metaphysics? I read Nietzsche in high school but he did not make me an atheist, the natural world did. Personally I always joke that I call myself an athiest because I’m not educated enough to be a ‘bright’ or optimistic enough to be ‘humanist’ but I’ll be happy to leap at the defense of science, biology and Darwynism, even when somebody is beating up Dawkins in hopes that nobody will retaliate.
The natural world made me a Pantheist, perspective is everything.