The God Delusion

So far, two friends of mine [I only have four, so this constitutes a full 50% of my entire social network…] have asked me, on separate occassions, about the shiny new Richard Dawkins book, The God Delusion.
Basically, I’ve been asked, “Should we, [the Believers in Exile], read this thing?”
And both times my answer has been, “I have no idea.”
I’ve never read anything by Richard Dawkins, and I know next to nothing of him. There are so many authors writing nowadays about the ideological war between Science and Religion that it is impossible for me to keep up to what is being set out on the bookstore shelves.
However, I am at a bookstore right now, as I write this. So I am taking a look at the book.
It is very shiny. Wonderfully matches my Mac Powerbook G4!

Just leafing through the thing, and reading here and there, I guess I will take the jacket blurb’s description of Dawkins at face value. It claims that he is “the world’s most prominent atheist.”
And a scientist. This book seems to be quite forcefully arguing that a belief in God is not just wrong but potentially deadly. Dawkins argues for the abolition of religion as the only hope for the healthy maintenance of mankind. In the preface, we read, “Imagine, with John Lennon, a world with no religion. Imagine no suicide bombers, no 9/11, no 7/7, no Crusades, no Gunpowder Plot…” etc.
As readers of this blog will know, I am no stranger to this argument, because it is similar to the writings and ideas of Sam Harris, an author I have come to greatly appreciate. I think it must be admitted by all rational-thinking people that religious zeal can cause a multitude of “sins.” At one point, Dawkins even quotes Blaise Pascal [yes, he of the wager] as saying, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Yes, yes, assuredly, and verily verily…. yes.
So I am paging through the book, browsing, as it were.

Then, a neat thing happened as I walked over to the Starbucks section of the store, to get another coffee. I glanced down at a table where someone had left a copy of New Scientist, the magazine. Picking it up, I opened directly to a review of The God Delusion, written by moral philosopher and author, Mary Midgley.
Fascinating stuff.
The general tone is a bit critical [of Dawkins] and I will get to that part, soon.
But first, Midgley points out that in the three evilist [← my word] regimes of the 20th Century [Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and Stalinist Russia], the removal of religion had not helped at all. She says, “The roots of great crimes plainly lie far deeper than the doctrines people use to justify them.”

I keep reading…. walk back to my own table with a new coffee, and this magazine….

I will greatly summarize here by saying that she…. hmmm, how can I say it…. she points out that Dawkins has a very difficult time with the type of “believer” who may say they do not care much for the doctrine of the Trinity or the historical truth of the gospels. ← I myself am this type of mysterious quasi-believer, so my antennae go up here…! Dawkins declares flatly that people like me [who would say the above, and much more] cannot possibly mean what they say. We cannot be “believers”. As scientists, we must be atheists. Midgley says, “It seems not to have struck Dawkins that academic science is only a small, specialised, dependent part of what anybody knows.”
Aha!
See, she goes on to point out that when we use the term “fundamentalist” to describe the sold-out, nutso-believer/fanatic out there, we ought to realize that there is also another type of “fundamentalist” running amok! This would be the atheistic “fundamentalist.” [By the way, Midgley does not use this terminology, I am wildly paraphrasing at this point, utilizing a combination of rabid eisegesis and possibly illegal bloggistic license!]
In other words, we [including Dawkins himself] can err just as badly on the opposite end of whatever spectrum we are dealing with here.
The spectrum of “belief ← → non-belief” I will call it.
And to elucidate her reasons for saying this, please allow me to quote directly from the latter part of her review itself. It is, in my opinion, such good stuff that it merits regurgitation in its fullness, here:

“Most human knowledge is tacit knowledge – habitual assumptions, constantly updated and checked by experience, but far too general and informal ever to be fully tested. We assume, for instance, that nature will go on being regular, that other people are conscious and that their testimony can generally be trusted. Without such assumptions neither science nor any other study could ever get off the ground, and nor could everyday life.
When we build on these foundations we necessarily use imaginative structures – powerful ideas which can be called myths, which are not lies, but graphic thought-patterns that shape and guide our thinking. This is not irrational: the process of using these structures is a necessary preparation for reasoning. Thus the selfish gene is a powerful idea, so are the Science-Religion war, Gaia, natural selection, progress, and the hidden hand of the market.
With the largest, most puzzling questions, we have no choice but to proceed in mythical language which cannot be explained in detail at all, but which serves to indicate what sort of spiritual universe we percieve ourselves to be living in. This is the province of religion. Adding God is not, as Dawkins thinks, adding an illicit extra item to the cosmos, it is perceiving the whole thing differently.
For a long time, this kind of language was reasonably well understood. Since the mid-19th century, however, there has been a disastrous attempt to get rid of it, keeping only literal statements of fact. This is, of course, the root of religious fundamentalism, which tries, absurdly, to treat the whole of that strange compilation, the Bible, as literal fact. Yet in so doing it is only responding to a less obvious fundamentalism on the scientistic side, which claims that our knowledge reduces to one fundamental form – the literal statements of science. Both extremes show a similarly crass refusal to admit the complexity of life.
Dawkins is, of course, quite right to express horror at Biblical fundamentalism, especially in the neocon form that centres on the book of Revelation. But it is not possible to attack this target properly while also conducting a wider, cluster-bomb onslaught on everything that can be called religion. Since this particular bad form of religion is spreading rapidly in the world, we urgently need to understand it: not just to denounce it but to grasp much better than we do now why people find it attractive. It is not enough to say, as Dawkins does, that they are being childish.
We also need to ask why they have found the other attitudes that are open to them inadequate. As I have suggested, this means becoming more aware of the inadequacies of our own way of life, which are obvious to them and which put them off the opinions that we profess. What we need, in fact, is a bit more self-knowledge.” **

Amen to that!

Having said all this, and having read all of this… does it make me, as a reader, want to read the Dawkins book MORE, or LESS?
→ MORE!
Like a cat, I am drawn to shiny things.

** From Imagine There’s No Heaven, by Mary Midgley. -- A review of Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. New Scientist Magazine, Oct.7-13, 2006. pp.50-51.

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