Fairieology

I went to hear Richard Dawkins speak last week. I was a little underwhelmed. As I think I’ve reported to several of you already, I was surprised by how polite and by how superficial he was. (Politeness here is a relative thing. He made plenty of barbed comments about religion and religious people. They just didn’t contain quite the level of vitriol that I expected.)

One criticism that I’ve frequently heard leveled at Dawkins is that the beliefs and ways of thinking he attacks represent just about the worst and least sophisticated to be found. I can overlook that to a degree. Most people (atheists included) aren’t very thoughtful about much of anything, and their ideas about God are no exception. If Dawkins is attacking tribalistic, unthinking, reactionary, inherited religious belief, that’s ok by me.

But Dawkins doesn’t seem to make that distinction himself. In an interview I read a few days later, he shrugged off the charge that he attacks only straw men by saying that if fairies don’t exist, it’s not reasonable to insist that he isn’t making a real argument unless he addresss only the best theories in fairieology.

This is an objection that seems to be more rhetorical than anything. It does nonetheless explain the vapidity of Dawkin’s arguments. In his presentation, he never really broached the question of whether God exists or whether one religion or another is true. (He briefly criticized intelligent design, which he called “creationism, and don’t let anyone tell you there’s a difference”. I’m so amazed by what he said that I’m not sure I’m remembering it correctly. He pointed to Fred Hoyle’s old analogy of a tornado assembling a 747 and claimed that this is the sum total of “creationist” arguments. We see an eye, observe that its chance assembly from a soup of its constituent parts is statistically impossible, and conclude that it must have been designed. That’s it.) With the assumption that God doesn’t exist and that no religions are true, it becomes trivially easy to ridicule religious people.

So, how is it that Dawkins has sold a million and a half copies of The God Delusion? I suggest that his audience is willing to overlook the fact that he has less than nothing of interest to say about God or religion from a philosophical or theological point of view because they are coming to see that treating religion with postmodern kid gloves isn’t a viable long term strategy. Religious people mutilate the genitals of their little girls, they blow themselves up in public places, they hate gay people, they prevent research from being done on stem cells, they start wars in Iraq, and all for reasons which aren’t open to public scrutiny. We’re supposed to respect a person’s religious viewpoint in the same way that we respect other expressions of his culture. So, while our president is saying that he respects Islam as a religion of peace, Richard Dawkins is one of the few people writing books and giving lectures about how religion deserves no special consideration. It’s an outlet for those who live in a liberal, pluralistic society and are unsure of how to deal with the unwashed masses, people who actually believe their religion corresponds to reality in more than a comfort-giving, subjective way.

For the above reason, my suspicion (and hope) is that very few people (beyond overwrought college students who belong to organizations like Atheist Longhorns) take Richard Dawkins seriously. His thinking is escapist, and most people read his books for the same reason that they watch tv shows like 24.