Editorial: Enjoying the fight?

by Christian Bell, Editor in Chief

Richard Dawkins is having a bad month.

The infamous Oxford biologist – whose “selfish gene” sociobiological theories have raised the eyebrows of theologians, philosophers, and not a few of his fellow scientists – had just gotten his latest book The God Delusion out to a great deal of [predictable] praise. “An impassioned, rigorous rebuttal to religion,” “many flashes of brilliance,” and “smart, compassionate, and true” were just a few of the flowery bits of praise Dawkins’ atheistic opus received.

Secularists might have thought that Dawkins, long a champion of impassioned anti-religious rhetoric, had landed a crushing blow in the name of science and against religious thinking. Seen in a vacuum, they may very well have been right. But Dawkins’ writing enjoys no such pillar of unanimity among the great thinkers of the present day, and in the past weeks his book has fallen between the crosshairs of two well-respected critics.

Dawkins’ first critic, by the matter of a few days, was British literary critic and philosopher Terry Eagleton. Eagleton, writing in the London Review of Books, refers to Dawkins’ acidic arguments as “vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince,” and writes, “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.” Eagleton, who happens to be a contemporary of Slavoj Žižek (due to visit the CTS auditorium next month), comes down strongly against Dawkins for failing to differentiate fundamentalism from faith.

Perhaps more significant than Eagleton, however (at least from this side of the ocean), was Gilead author Marilynne Robinson’s take on Dawkins in the just-off-the-press November issue of Harper’s. More than a few intellectuals felt their heart skip a beat at the mention of a Robinson v. Dawkins duel; if modern academia had a World Series, such a match-up would surely sell out the ballpark. True to form (the reader’s familiarity with The Death of Adam is here assumed), Robinson does not disappoint in taking Dawkins to task for his ahistorical and ad hominem-infused arguments, noting that “There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins's view of science.” (One also wonders how much more piercing Robinson’s concluding remark on Amish pacificism would be had she written the review just a few weeks later, after the violence that claimed the lives of five Amish girls in Pennsylvania.)

Indeed, it might be the true delight of Christian scholars and theists the world over to see Dawkins, the intellectual playground bully, take a few well-deserved blows over his writing. It is admittedly quite difficult not to chuckle at both writers’ prosaic handling of Dawkins’ churlish demeanor.

But it deserves to be asked whether we, as both practitioners of rhetoric and disciples of Christ, should enjoy seeing the playground bully roughed up as such. This is not to say at all that either Eagleton’s or Robinson’s responses went over the line; one hopes that Dawkins would be big enough to admit that both critiques highlight significant flaws in his reasoning. It is to say that we ought not to take too much delight in watching the blows land, nor too much confidence that they signal the other side being down for the count.

Neither Dawkins’ nor his critics’ efforts come anywhere close to sealing the contentious rifts between science and faith or theism and secularism, and to be sure, neither side put forth their arguments in the hope of such a victory anyway. The number of “converts” to either side from such a debate probably number in the single digits, if there are any at all. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder whether the attrition from such a battle yields any true progress or whether “for six feet of France, a million lives were lost.”

The debates are important, and they signify for the theistic side an unwillingness to let overeager scientists who dabble in metaphysics the opportunity to run about making riotous proclamations about “why there almost certainly is no God” (one of Dawkins’ chapters). At the same time, however, we ought not suppose that reasonable and defensible counterarguments to such churlishness signify a sure and certain regression of atheistic or anti-theistic rhetoric.

That Dawkins’ arguments are addressed and dispatched is fine. That Dawkins yet remains a formidable adversary to Christianity and theism is certain.

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