In Defence of Richard Dawkins
The news that Richard Dawkins considers himself to be a cultural Christian is not in fact news. He’s been saying it for years. The biologist and author likes carols and churches and prefers mild Anglicanism to full-throated Islam.
There’s no major contradiction here. It makes it a little strange that he has focused on the God question as if Wahhabis are even 0.1 per cent as liable to listen to him as mild Anglicans. But one can be an atheist who prefers one religion to another — much as vegetarians can prefer people eating free range chickens to factory farmed pigs.
Besides, I can’t help respecting Dawkins for his stubborn focus on what he believes is true. Since the new atheist craze, more nuanced non-believers have been more willing to accept that while religious truth claims might not be true, they might contain truths in an indirect sense — their stories and practices shaping and fulfilling human instincts.
The biologist and Ivermectin champion Bret Weinstein, for example, comments:
As for religious belief, the question shouldn’t be ‘are the beliefs literally true?’ The important question is, ‘are they adaptive?’ My term is “metaphorical truths”.
Non-believers have also been more willing to accept that the absence of theism is not necessarily superior to its presence. “Religion poisons everything,” Hitchens said. But can religions not be secular? Konstantin Kisin writes:
… the problem … is that the absence of old religion seems to produce only a vacuum into which a new religion rushes in. And this new religion has just as little regard for the truth as the old ones. That’s why Richard Dawkins who spent his best years arguing with creationists is now increasingly forced to explain basic biological concepts like the inability to change your sex by incantation on national television.
I think Weinstein and Kisin are both correct. Theism does contain “metaphorical” truths, and its absence can be more obnoxious than its presence. (I recall similar arguments back when “postrationalism” was a novel term.) The problem, to paraphrase Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, is, “It doesn’t matter what we think!”
The idea that you can reject religious beliefs while accepting religious practices might have made sense in the early 1900s. Sure, it contains a whiff of snobbery that I don’t much enjoy. I’m too smart to be religious, it implies, But that doesn’t mean it isn’t good for the plebs.
Yet that’s not the real problem with it. The real problem is that in the 2020s it’s increasingly irrelevant. Far fewer Christians in the West are practicing the faith, and their numbers are declining.
Whether we have evangelical atheists or not doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. People aren’t dropping out of churches because of Richard Dawkins’ “Boeing 747” response to the argument from design. I don’t think it’s even because of clerical scandals, real and appalling as they are. It’s because of a far more vague and broad acceptance of the implausibility and inconsequentiality of religious belief. Rejecting the vital truth claims of religion does not place you in a cognitive elite. It makes you, well — pretty normal.
So, unless you’re into Islam — one faith that is spreading in the West, if as a consequence of immigration rather than conversion — you’re wasting your time when you take about the functionality of faith. You might as well talk about the psychological advantages of belief on dowsing. It’s an interesting subject, sure, but its actual significance is limited when belief is in decline.
This won’t be changed by people deciding that it would be nice if more of us were religious. Jordan Peterson’s lectures have been watched millions of times. His books have sold millions of copies. How many of his fans have started going to church? Some, I’m sure, but not enough to turn the steep decline around.
It’s difficult to meme yourself into eating salad even when you know it will be good for you. It’s far more difficult to meme yourself into going to church, let alone accepting the ethical standards of dedicated belief. (Again, people do it — but not many people.)
The truth is that the Christian faith will be relevant in Europe and America — in the immediate future at least — only if people believe that its claims are true — and not true in a watery metaphorical sense but actually true.
I’ve been writing a book about this, so I should be careful not to empty my weapons depot before the war, but new atheists were better friends to theists than mild faith respecters. In one speech, the Catholic philosopher Edward Feser optimistically compared the struggle between religious believers and new atheists to the struggle between the complacent Rocky Balboa and Clubber Lang:
[Lang] is portrayed as a ruthless, vulgar, swaggering blowhard … He glories in his own prowess, his own might. And yet while as a boxer that might lies in sheer brute force, he does indeed have that. He is also focused and self-disciplined. And he is undeniably driven to win, in a way Rocky no longer is, and at any cost.
So, we have, as the first act of the movie reaches its climax, a champion who is a good man but who has become overconfident, sloppy, and short-sighted. And we have a challenger who is a bad man but who is in peak fighting condition and utterly single-minded. Say what you will for Mr. T’s character, he means business … So, though we root for Rocky, when Mr. T knocks his block off we have to admit that Rocky was asking for it.
This being a Rocky movie, that is, of course, not the end of the story. Jolted back to reality by his humiliating defeat at the hands of Clubber Lang, Rocky regains his focus and drive to win, gets himself back into fighting shape, and goes on to reclaim his title after defeating Mr. T’s character in a rematch. He may even be a better fighter for having had to pick himself up again after his initial defeat; certainly he is a wiser one. In that way the challenge posed by Mr. T’s character was a blessing in disguise.
Passive cultural Christians, on the other hand, are telling believers that everything is fine. They are reminding them of their past accomplishments. They are congratulating them on their faded glory. Have a day off, Mr Balboa.
Richard Dawkins might have made bad arguments against belief in God (indeed, he did). Yet he gave believers more credit than someone who does not take the “belief” bit seriously.
There is nothing new here as far as Dawkins goes. I continue to be amazed at how much air time he gets. He is neither wise, nor particularly smart, nor anyone worth listening to on any subject. (I read and listened to him a lot before coming to this conclusion.) His choice of "cultural christianity" is just an extension of his nihilist worldview. He is simply choosing something he thinks is better based on a relative moral fantasy.
It is terribly sad. He knows he cannot, or should not, live with the logical conclusion of his worldview, and like most nihilists he chooses to whistle past the graveyard.
The problem with rejecting religious beliefs as implausible is that the people who do so are often left holding onto beliefs that are in turn rendered implausible by the absence of the religious frame of reference that made them plausible in the first place. In the absence of some idea of the transcendent that has some extra-linguistic reality these beliefs are reduced to no more than assertion and blind faith.
So, the idea that all humans by virtue of simply being human are of equal worth and are bearers of rights is implausible once the religious underpinning is removed. Likewise, the idea that the arc of history bends towards justice is wishful thinking in the absence of some transcendent other present in history.