Hitchens Watch: Dawkins disappoints

Dawkins disappoints

Sunday, March 16, 2008

# posted by Mark G : 8:34 AM

Professor D gave a lecture in Manhattan on Saturday night at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on 64th Street and Central Park West (same place where Hitchens uneasily debated D’Souza). It was a brave scene, as hundreds stretched down 64th Street and curled around the corner down Broadway. I got there at 5:40 for the 7pm show time and there were already about 150 people waiting in line. It was typical New York pseudo-intellectual atmosphere: Some loathsome advance man running around asking us to donate money; a crew of weird left-wingers stationed up and down the line proposing their newspaper “Revolution” for a look-see; a guy handing out postcards about his new book, and a cacophony of awkward conversations about religion and the event we were about to watch. One thing curious about this line was that practically every single person was white. Several passers-by, some clearly tourists, stopped to ask me what the line was for. “Osama bin Laden. He’s, uh, giving a speech.”

There was something strangely wrong about all of us dedicating so much time just to hear Dawkins. Had we all nothing better to do? Apparently not. If he'd been debating Chris Hedges, that'd been one thing, but it was just Richard there to talk about his book. Say what you will about the man, he doesn’t actually deserve this sort of attention. I don’t think anybody does. Smart guy and all, but if you’ve read The God Delusion, you probably already know the gist of what he’s going to say, and in the age of You Tube, where videos of him speaking can be seen with ease, it’s hard to justify waiting in line for an hour and a half to hear him speak in person.

However, he does bring with him an interesting, somewhat entertaining slide show. And his lecture demonstrated how religion doesn’t pass the muster of scientific examination, because it is based entirely on belief without evidence. (Not that this isn’t obvious, but it’s nice to see a scientist show it.)

He had one bit about how, to scientists, belief in God is like belief in storks delivery babies over the “pregnancy theory”. In one interesting clip, he compared various religious beliefs to the various scientific theories on the extinction of dinosaurs. He implied something like, ‘how can you respect all of them, or any of them, until you know which one is actually true?’

Fair enough. I thought he made a good case that existing religions are not ‘true’, but I think we were all expecting a bit more. Like, okay, let’s say the well-known religions are not true: do you really believe, and how can you prove, as you’ve heavily asserted, that religion is the cause of war and violence? Ever heard of the atheistic communists in Russia? And might not it be the case that violence in the ostensible name of religion is simply masking something much more profound? That, perhaps, most people only latch on to religious extremism because of economic circumstances and/or political grievances?

Or, more simply, if religion is indeed false, then what do we do about it?

Well, Dawkins did have some answers to this last question. He prescribed teaching comparative religion to all students at a young age, in addition to teaching the Bible as literature. He thinks such indirect tactics would slowly erode at least the pernicious elements of religious belief. And he doubted more direct tactics like taking on the sky godders in America on, say, the “under God” clause of the pledge of allegiance, since such things are merely token issues that might only arouse anger and be counterproductive, which I thought made sense, even if it goes against my instincts.

Still, the overarching questions…

During the Q&A a wiseass grad school type stood up to ask Dawkins if he didn’t think the New Atheism was just an “inverse fundamentalism” that carried with it many of the forms of bigotry and intolerance that come with religious fundamentalism. Dawkins answered petulantly by saying “we’re not fundamentalists because we don’t have a holy book, which we look to as something we know that is right.” I immediately thought, you don’t? Darwin aside, don’t they all know that, say, George Orwell was great and true?

The Q&A went kind of downhill from there for Dawkins. He knows science, but is relatively weak on history and politics. He was asked why colonized peoples have held onto their imposed religions more closely than the colonizers have, and he admitted frankly that he didn’t know why. He was also asked why he used the term “Darwinism” since it implies a cult of personality and a suggestion that it’s not a factual idea but a mere theory based on one man’s writings. He agreed that this was a good point and that he’d seriously re-consider ever using the term again. He also conceded that if some people seem to need to religion in order to cope with certain life-traumas, that he didn’t have a problem with that. I was beginning to wonder what the point of all this was.

Is it enough to simply say that religious beliefs cannot be proved scientifically, and should therefore be rejected? Aren’t there many other social, historical, cultural and political questions to consider? I am not a believer myself, but it’s no good just telling people that their beliefs are not provable by science and then just walking off as if you’ve accomplished something. I wanted to ask him if he feared that atheism or secular values might be exploited as a part of a campaign to attack Islamic countries, but I didn’t have the chance. I suspect he would’ve waffled on this question, like he did on all the others not related to science.

I ended up liking Richard Dawkins the man and the scientist, but he just doesn’t have what it takes to fully tackle the question of religion, and certainly doesn’t have much if anything to offer on the political implications of his atheism. I even smelled a whiff of conservative indifference if not tacit agreement with how the War on Terror by America and Britain was being conducted.

If this is the best atheism has to offer, then Penn and Teller are screwed…

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