Mary Midgley on The God Delusion
Dawkins's central arguments invite one to go beyond commonsense
Midgley's critique of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion can be summarized as an embarrassing display of lack of understanding of Dawkins’ central arguments. Right off the bat, the first sentence of Midgley’s critique reads "Dawkins wants to live in a world without religion because [Dawkins] holds [religion] responsible for many of the world's greatest atrocities". This could not be further from the truth.
While a large portion of Midgley’s critique is dedicated to expanding on the above conclusion, only briefly does Dawkins address this issue—and even that is to counter the common misperception (primarily amongst religious people) that without religion the world would fall into chaos and brutality. Dawkins writes “the interesting question is not whether evil (or good) individual human beings were religious or were atheists … [the central question is] whether atheism [or theism] systematically influences people to do bad things”. There you have it. As any scientist would hold dear, such conclusion about religion could only come after a scientific statistical study of the influence of religion on people. Dawkins neither sites such research nor claims to either side of the conclusion. Thus there is no reason to conclude a world without religion is any safer than one with. Dawkins wants, to the extent The God Delusion revels it, to live in a world without religion because while religious dogma prevents us from seeking to understand nature for what it is, there is no logical argument for God’s existence.
The rest of Midgley’s critique could only be summarized as a lot of mumbo-jumbo. First of all, while scientific knowledge accounts for only a “small, specialized” part of what we know about the world, Midgley argues, a lot of human knowledge, simply stated, is based upon commonsense. She goes on to claim “without such assumptions neither science nor any other study could ever get off the ground”. While I completely fail to see the relevance of what she is trying to say to Dawkins’ book, I can’t help but wonder perhaps she missed the whole point of the discussion at hand.
Not since the discovery of sub-atomic particles has our understanding of the physical world greatly benefited from the study of human assumptions and norms. Quite the contrary, when it comes to the natural world, we have learned to suppress or ignore our assumptions about the natural world and follow the deeply penetrating conclusions of scientific inquiries (think quantum mechanics). Likewise, The God Delusion is not a discourse under the haze of human assumptions and commonsense. Through his “consciousness raising” theme, Dawkins is arguing how our primal instincts and fears, and historical institutions have held us slaves to ideals that in the dawn of the twenty-first century should be completely abandoned.
Re: Mary Midgley on The God Delusion
Re: Mary Midgley on The God Delusion
But that is by no means to say that her critique is 'mumbo-jumbo', as you put it. Rather, there is a rigorous logic to her critique of 'scientism', which Dawkins's work represents, but this is a critique that requires a broader understanding of Midgley than what we can get from two pages in New Scientist. In very general terms, her argument is that science -- and Dawkins in particular -- is just as susceptible to the kind of dogmatic and irrational 'thinking' as are the 'religious' people that he is so quick to attack -- and indeed, that characterising all religious people as having the same 'religious mentality' as those fundamentalists who responded so egregiously to the publication of the cartoons of Mohammed in Denmark is itself an absurd claim to make!
I bring this up not to provoke an argument here, but only to point out that just as there is much more to say about this from Dawkins's side, so too is there much more to it from Midgley's side. And the point they both want to make, I think, is that it does a great disservice to both sides if we reduce their arguments to the kinds of simplistic formulations we all to often get on the Internet.
Nevertheless, thanks for the provocative article!
Andrew.