English literary critic/cultural theorist/philosopher/these-lines-have-gotten-very-blurry-these-last-sixty-or-so-years Terry Eagleton is one of the awesomest dudes who presses pens against paper in the English-speaking world. [I wish I could link to something more substantial than his Wikipedia page here, but his "homepage," such as it is, consists of about two paragraphs of academic boilerplate on the U of Manchester server, and anyway the 'kipedia page is there to serve as a springboard to a host of valuable external links]. Any readers interested in the power and flexibility of text, or wondering how the left can build anything out of Marxism’s ruins, or who have a hunch that postmodernism is a crock of shit and need an academic’s eloquent (and hilarious) words to support such a proclamation, are invited to check him out.
So there’s that. Now, I heard, on NPR’s All Things Considered yesterday, a much stuffier academic from across the Thames plugging his latest opus The God Delusion. This was one Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, coiner of “meme,” and an expert in zoology and evolutionary theory, who recently has been given to funneling most of his energy into lectures and monographs limning an agenda for popularizing science by deemphasizing its coldness, and promulgating atheism by making ill-considered arguments not only for its beauty, but for its supposed “rationality.” A once respectable and eminent hard-science man, now transformed into Oxford’s most vaunted dilettante. A sad story. And check out that photo of him with the binoculars. What a dick.
Now for the compulsory sidebar: I’m kind of an atheist myself. That is, on the faith-spectrum, I fall sort of around the “soft atheist” zone, which is to say that the question of God’s existence doesn’t enter into my daily affairs all that much. I’ve been for many years a loud trumpeteer of a delicious quote from Luis Buñuel that summarizes my take on the matter perfectly: “If someone were to prove to me—right this minute—that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it would not change a single aspect of my behavior.” My sentiments captured decades before my birth. If there’s no God, fine. The world’s arguably cooler without Him. If there is a God, fine. Whatever He is, He loves me the way I am. This is my way of quickly dismissing the subject when it comes up in conversation. But when I am inclined to entertain actual deep thinking on the subject (often in the wake of having entertained actual deep drinking), I invariably drift from “soft atheist” to “aggressive agnostic,” which in one sense is not a great distance to travel, but in another is a very long march indeed. I become tickled with the idea of God, if for no better reasons than because it’s a very beautiful idea, and it gives my brain an occasion to stretch out and test its strength. What if God did exist, invisible and everywhere, behind everything, connecting all life? If God did exist, he would be just that: the connections between things. The depth of all things. The capacity, or the inclination, to love. In this respect, is a belief in God mutually exclusive with, to adduce one of innumerable examples, a belief in evolution? No. A trust in science, at least for handling our material progress as a species? Absolutely not. So I guess my feeling is I ultimately don’t care all that much about whether or not there’s a God, but if there IS, I know all about Him. And I’m as firm as ever in my belief that never will an event transpire nor will conditions arise in our universe that will “prove” God’s existence or non-. The very idea of evidence to support one claim or the other is ludicrous. They’re not even claims. Claims by definition can be supported, and these (faiths, beliefs, hopes) are exactly the things that cannot be.
So, anyway, what does Dawkins come out and say on the radio? What does his attack on God available for $15.07 from Amazon.com boil down to? “If you believe God exists, the onus is on you to prove it.” Wow, what a bold throwing down of the gauntlet! Congratulations on having watched the movie Contact.
What is it with these douchebag scientists? Maybe this is excessively Enlightenment-y, but shouldn’t scientists have the richest imaginations of us all? These guys for whom Dawkins speaks (and I know they are legion) have the combined imagination of sheetrock. This is why you’re an atheist? Because you’re waiting for proof? This is the last guy I want lecturing me on how beautiful the universe is.
The rest of what I heard him say through the sound of my own blood violently thrumming in my skull sounded like a diatribe against organized religion, another intellectual punching bag from a hundred and fifty years ago, except a hundred a fifty years ago religion was a very sturdy societal pillar, and to question and attack it was an act of bravery, and today calling out worshippers is like torching ants with a magnifying glass. If you’re an anti-religious mouthpiece in today’s world, you’re almost certainly taking your shots at either: the Catholic church, which is crumbling at fantastic speeds and hardly worth the effort it takes to pick up the sledgehammer and join in, or the American Evangelical Juggernaut, which is a worthy foe indeed, but which is already bombarded from all sides by every blogger known to Blogspot every day and does very little in the way of budging because the weapons used against it are worthless: utterly inane ad hominem character attacks (”Go home and fuck your sister, redneck! I hope I just demonstrated how I’m better than you!”) that fail because Fox News is better at character attacks than bloggers are. On the subject of that nefarious contingent (the evangelicals, not the bloggers), I have to remain optimistic about it just naturally devouring itself sometime over the course of the next three or four presidential elections, right as the ink is starting to dry on the chapters about George W. Bush in the new editions of all the high school history books.
Now, having said all that: I have my own problems—major, heartfelt, serious-as-cancer problems—with organized religion. This is a post for another time, but in short, I think it’s currently the biggest hindrance to the evolution of our species. But that’s a good reason to dislike it. And while I’m disliking it—and by “it” I mean all the world’s religions, institutionally—I can still respect the individual worshippers, most of whom are genuinely good people and have the world’s best interests at heart. Now let’s get back to Dawkins.
Tacit in his attacks on religion and faith were a number of implications that just about every religious person I know would find grossly insulting. I don’t know if I can list them all, because I came late to the interview and had to focus most of my energy on navigating my car through an unfamiliar neighborhood, but let’s see… 1.) all religions are interchangeable, 2.) all faith is blind, 3.) any values handed down from religious practice are innately poisonous and lack utility because they’re all predicated on silliness (this belief seemed to dwell at the heart of his contention that religion (not faith, religion) had nothing to do with the development of the moral compass of a child raised in its midst), and of course my favorite a priori chestnut, 4.) the ol’ man-with-a-white-beard deal. No mention of the possibility of a non-entity God like my notional God. No mention really of any God other than one imagined in the most simplistic and wrongheaded distillation of the Judeo-Christian model: a planetary figurehead, who made us all for no discernable reason but is pretty damned insistent that we behave ourselves. Always looking for reasons to be pissed off, eager to judge, niggardly with his love. This is the sort of primitive, narrow-minded God-talk that turns nine-year-old boys into atheists. But for an adult? It takes some pretty severe cosmic myopia to reject any and all conceptions of a higher power based on what one particular book, or one particular dum-dum pounding on a copy of said book, told you God was. We really ought to expect more from a tenured Oxford professor who’s promoting a written work on the subject.
But that’s the thing: the more impassioned a person’s unreasonable fear or hatred of a given subject, the flimsier will his denouncements of the subject be, because the fear/hatred of the subject precludes the kind of goodwill that would inspire the person to actually research the subject. As a result, Dawkins’s whole argument was as feeble as it was vitriolic, and he came off looking almost comically prejudicial, like a hardened homophobe asked to expatiate on just why exactly he hates The Gays so darn much. What kind of thoughtful answer can you expect if you put a question like that to a person like that?
You can imagine my glee when this post from MetaFilter trickled into my RSS inbox, linking to a Terry Eagleton review of The God Delusion for the London Review Bookshop (remember an hour ago, when I mentioned Terry Eagleton?) “Review” is too ordinary a word for what this is. Eagleton quickly but gorgeously offers his venomous opinion of Dawkins’s merits as a writer, making a lot of the same arguments I just did, but better, and then proceeds to take him straight behind the woodshed and teach him a thing or two about theology. And he manages always to be rhetorically devastating without being nasty, clever without being pedantic, and savagely funny without being cheap. Once again, I’m glad to know I can count on this guy to speak for me. This is exactly the stuff I would have said to Dawkins yesterday, if only he had been in the car with me, and I hadn’t been muted by exasperation, and I were much smarter and more literate than I actually am.
