07:04 AM

A sketchy and clearly underthought-out opinion of Richard Dawkins

I think one of the reasons I am supremely uninterested in Dawkins et al.’s unceasing scornful attack on religion and non-rational belief is that, unlike them, I am not concerned with with how objectively correct other people’s (or my own, frankly) beliefs about the world are. In fact, I don’t think it’s meaningful to talk about how beliefs about the world of a religious or philosophical nature as factual at all. Notwithstanding a certain portion of the religious population which intentionally and explicitly insists on a literal realization of their beliefs (and I should be very clear here that I don’t mean “literal reading”, that is, the notion I’m outlining is not of beliefs about the world that have a factual quality, but are simply metaphorical, and is not that everybody who is not in this portion has simply taken whatever propositions of their tradition to be metaphorical rather than literal accounts of historical events or ontological circumstances; that might be true or not but I am not addressing it), it seems to me that what we call our “beliefs” don’t take the form of facts about the configuration of the world, or of history, that we believe to be true, in the same sense that we believe this desk to be made of wood, etc., but rather as assumptions according to which we determine our behavior.

Assuming a basically scientifically educated population (and I mean: having heard of the laws of motion, knowing that giant turtles have no place in our cosmology, in any physical sense at least), nearly every religious, spiritual or epistemological belief that is possessed by the people I’ve spoken to has much less force or relevance as a concrete fact which might be true or false. I don’t think you need to be an arch-rationalist to understand that something which one takes on faith and which has no concrete perceptible existence does not belong to the same category of knowledge as what is in the tires of a car, or the contents of my desk drawer. Its wrongness never comes into play; but what does come into play rather often in life is the spectacularly expansive constellation of assumptions, beliefs and inclinations we construct for ourselves in order to guide, inform or justify our behavior, ethical and otherwise.

The arch rationalist might come to a similar conclusion but frame it thus: sure, they’re embarassingly wrong, but they allow for an ethical framework. And that is not at all my contention. I don’t think any religious belief should be viewed as slightly pathetic but possibly useful or at least not harmful. I think the nature of religious belief very often has nothing to do with rightness or wrongness. It is very often something which is ascribed by whoever holds it no actual truth value at all, not in any functional sense.

3 Comments

Comments

  1. My tradition of “atheism” runs from Feuerbach to Žižek — it's a history of humanist critique of religion, and uses the techniques of psychology, anthropology and literary theory to frame the “problem” of religion. From the perspective of this tradition, what is really interesting is what is going on under the surface of the factual claims that religions make. That's what accounts for why people believe in myths, or religious doctrines like the Trinity. Dawkins basically can't account for this; for him, the surface claims are wrong or incoherent, therefore religion is basically pathological. He can't make sense of it, therefore it doesn't make sense.A humanist tradition of atheism is way, way better poised than Dawkins's materialism to have a conversation with religion at the theological level.(I may have just hit on a potentially interesting general conception of atheism: that for which religion as such is a standing “problem”.)

    creases on

  2. I write stuff like this when I'm stoned out of my gourd. Posted at 7:04am I note, so that's a pretty late night, I'm thinking.I wish people would be a lot less stupid about their religious beliefs, but there's many centuries of evidence that this is a forlorn hope.So I do my best to ignore it all, and get on with my own stuff.

    Chaz on

  3. I think this is characteristic of the Jewish tradition, which of course demands faith but pays far more attention to actions. Christians take belief in abstract propositions much, much more seriously. Against the innumerable Christian holy wars (often involving rioting and even torture and executions) about whether the Son was unbegotten, begotten, or created, or whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son, we can set only the possible murder of Abraham Kohn in Lemberg/Lviv.

    John Cowan on