Blindness of heart, pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, oh my!

An Open Letter to Richard Dawkins

Dear Sir,

I note, with some dismay, that your book The God Delusion has sold many millions of copies worldwide and won some critical acclaim. I say ‘dismay’ not because of any ill-will towards you personally; while my outlook on your personality is rather dim given what I know, I am the first to admit that it’s hard to judge the character of somebody with whom one has never interacted from three thousand miles away. Indeed, I wish you personally the very best, as far as that goes.

I say ‘dismay’ rather because—and I think you’ll agree with me on this conclusion, though obviously not on the reasoning—in my view your book’s considerable success is a symptom of astounding philosophical illiteracy in our society.

The copy of your book that I normally use for these purposes (in addition to being something that I picked up for fifty cents that went to my county library instead of to you) currently has a good deal of red ink on its pages. Some I spilled because I’m clumsy, but more is there for a reason. It’s in the margins and it says things like ‘Hume’s fork’, ‘petitito principi’, ‘naturalistic fallacy’,  ‘failure to advance an argument composed of multiple theses’, ‘please read Teilhard de Chardin properly next time’, and at one point (I admit I was in a bad mood already on that day) simply ‘you fail logic forever’. The reasons why are many and, to be quite frank, have been well-documented by the many ripostes to your book. I highly doubt that you are aware of the specific content of much of the philosophical argument surrounding your work as you seem to adhere to an academic language and modus operandi entirely foreign to the way philosophy of religion actually works. I will therefore confine this letter to stern talkings-to on matters of presentation, style, and the mechanics of philosophical discourse.

Like it or not, you’re doing philosophy of religion, not biology. I will not here attempt to refute your argument that the question of God should be treated as a scientific one, but the fact remains that you are indeed treading into philosophical and theological waters, which have rules that, while internally just as coherent as those of the natural sciences, operate on some rather different sets of assumptions that you would do well to familiarise yourself with even though it’s unfair to expect you to instantly agree with them or accept them as objectively valid.

One assumption that’s different in science and philosophy regards the etiquette of responses to and rebuttals of argument. I’m not a science person myself, but as I understand in, in scientific writing it’s generally considered uncalled-for for a book to be written specifically to attack the arguments of another book if it does not advance theses of its own. If somebody wrote a book that attacked the arguments of The Extended Phenotype but did not present the author’s own (hopefully well-supported) views on the subject of phenotypes and environmental adaptation, you would probably be quite understandably piqued.

In philosophical writing, however, a work is expected to evoke a litany of occasionally brutal criticism. Part of the point of this is to force the philosopher to re-examine his or her work to see if any of his or her opponents’ arguments against him or her hold any water. Thus your dismissal of books like the McGraths’s The Dawkins Delusion?, Cornwell’s Darwin’s Angel, and that bright young Dominican Father Crean’s A Catholic Replies as ‘fleas’ represents a failure of somebody involved to communicate to you that this is how philosophical discourse is supposed to work. It’s a long tradition. Nine hundred years ago Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, a very smart (if a little ill-informed) Persian man of letters, wrote a tract called The Incoherence of the Philosophers in which he criticised Avicenna’s neo-Aristotelian school of Islamic philosophy. A couple of generations later Abu l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, a Spanish polymath and ancestor of Sir Salman Rushdie, wrote a refutation defending the Avicennists called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, and Islamic philosophy was the better for the argument. At around the same time in Europe St Anselm of Canterbury and the monk Gaunilo of Marmoutiers had a similarly heated argument regarding St Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God.

These arguments both took place in the realm of philosophy in which The God Delusion as a text properly resides. I’m sorry if you think that your work should be treated according to scientific standards, but as the Italian branch of my family used to say, ‘you no play-a da game, you no make-a da rules’.

Moving on, I’d like to talk about the dust jacket’s claim that you are the world’s most prominent atheist. While this sentiment—that you are the person that most people likely think of when they think of a living atheist activist—is arguably valid, the statement is nevertheless false on its face. Among others, Barry Manilow, Nursultan Nazarbayev, Billy Joel, Warren Buffett, Kim Jong-il, Mikhail Gorbachev, and David Miliband are non-believers and I’d reckon than one or more of them at least is more ‘prominent’ (however we are defining that) than you are. Self-aggrandising statements may make your book look better to somebody who’s picking it up, but at the cost of your integrity.

You ask ‘do you have to read up on leprechauns not to believe in them?’ Well, no, but many would argue that, since most people have some fairly settled ideas on the subject of God, one should study more carefully what these ideas are if one intends to refute them. I will not attempt here to catalogue the highly debatable assertions that you make about the nature of religious faith, with one exception: your contention that faith is treated the same way in Judaism as in the other two major Abrahamic religions is entirely false. Jews have a millennia-old tradition of engaging their sacred texts in a critical, sometimes even deconstructionist way, and part of a Jewish birthright is the expectation of struggling with one’s Jewishness (‘Israel’ means ‘struggles with God’). Other than this, though, I’m sure that you can find many a religious person who will be willing to talk frankly with you about the differing, meticulous ideas about God that exist in different religions and within faith groups, and to hear your opinions on the matter. But from your prior statements and actions I’m beginning to think that you’re pretty much entirely unreceptive to the idea of such dialogue due to your deep-seated belief in the almost exactly equivalent worthlessness of all religious adherence and behaviour.

A closing suggestion—please familiarise yourself with some streams of religious thought that don’t make it into the news. While I doubt this will change your beliefs about the truth value of religion, it may lead to you reconsidering your opinions about religion’s universally detrimental effect on human society.

I’ll leave you with a list, divided by the religious viewpoint taken, of books, music, movies, television, and websites that you may find interesting, either as responses to your own writings and statements or as windows into aspects of religion that you do not seem to have previously considered.

Christian

Roman Catholic

Father Thomas Crean OP, God is No Delusion

John Dominic Crossan, God and Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now

Father Frederick Charles Copleston SJ CBE, Religion and the One: Philosophies East and West

John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens

Father Mashimo Kōichi SJ (laicised), The Girls-with-Guns Trilogy: Noir, Madlax, El Cazador de la Bruja (director)

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées

Protestant

Reasonable Faith (reasonablefaith.org)—website of William Lane Craig

Ravi Zacharias, The End of Reason

Robert E. Goss, Jesus Acted Up and Queering Christ

Eastern Orthodox

David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

Muslim

Reza Aslan, No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam

Hooman Majd, The Ayatollah Begs to Differ: The Paradox of Modern Iran

Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, Roadsinger (To Warm You through the Night)

Malcolm Clark, Islam for Dummies

Lapsed Muslim/Zoroastrian

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums

Jewish

Neil Gillman, Doing Jewish Theology: God, Torah & Israel in Modern Judaism

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

Hindu

Hinduism Today (hinduismtoday.com)—online version of magazine covering world issues from a Hindu perspective

Buddhist

V. Nithiyanandam, Theistic Buddhism

Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

Leonard Cohen Live in London

Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (which you have quoted but based on your interpretation of the quote may not have actually read)

Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (editors)

Robert E. Carter, The Nothingness beyond God: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nishida Kitarō (Nishida is a good example of how to do philosophy of religion very right, whether or not one agrees with his conclusions)

Shinto/Buddhist

Kajiura Yuki, Fiction suite (possibly the most brilliant living composer and nobody’s ever heard of her)

Nishimura Junji, Simoun (director)

Shinto

Yamakage Motohisa, The Essence of Shinto

Jinja Honcho—Civilization of the Divine Forest (jinjahoncho.or.jp)—website of the Association of Shinto Shrines, the world’s fourth-largest religious body

Secular

Ninian Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World’s Beliefs

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (which you have argued against but, again, may not actually have read)

Religious Tolerance (religioustolerance.org)—does exactly what it says on the tin.

Debates

Father Frederick Charles Copleston SJ CBE and Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Third Earl Russell, on the BBC in 1948

William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology

P.S. In case you were by some serendipitous fluke wondering, despite your assertions to the contrary, in many ways atheists had it better two hundred years ago than LGBT people in some parts of the world have it to-day. Look up ‘gay panic defence’, ‘corrective rape’, ‘anal glue torture’, and ‘Yahya A.J.J. Jammeh’.