BOOK REVIEW
Through a Glass, Darkly
Michael Ruse
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and
Love. Richard Dawkins. viii + 263 pp. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
$24.
Richard Dawkins once called me a "creep." He did so very
publicly but meant no personal offense, and I took none: We were,
and still are, friends. The cause of his ire—his anguish,
even—was that, in the course of a public discussion, I was
defending a position I did not truly hold. We philosophers are
always doing this; it's a version of the reductio ad
absurdum argument. We do so partly to stimulate debate
(especially in the classroom), partly to see how far a position can
be pushed before it collapses (and why the collapse), and partly
(let us be frank) out of sheer bloody-mindedness, because we like to
rile the opposition.
Dawkins, however, has the moral purity—some would say the
moral rigidity—of the evangelical Christian or the committed
feminist. Not even for the sake of argument can he endorse something
that he thinks false. To do so is not just mistaken, he feels; in
some deep sense, it is wrong. Life is serious, and there are evils
to be fought. There must be no compromise or equivocation, even for
pedagogical reasons. As the Quakers say, "Let your yea be yea,
and your nay, nay."
All of this comes through very strongly in Dawkins's new book, A
Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and
Love. At one level, to be candid, it is not much of a book. It
is a collection of what one might charitably call literary ephemera:
not real articles, or chapters, but bits and pieces—reviews,
introductions to the books of others, eulogies, items in the popular
press, and so forth. The pieces were written that way and read that
way. They are good for the moment, but hardly worth laying down for
the future. How often has one had a wonderful, local wine in a
little restaurant in Spain or Italy, and on bringing a bottle home
been amazed at how thin and sour it tastes when served up proudly to
one's friends? It is much this way with the contents of A
Devil's Chaplain.
On another level, however, Dawkins's collection is really
interesting and does raise absolutely crucial issues. In recent
years, his attention has swung from writing about science for a
popular audience to waging an all-out attack on Christianity. In the
name of Darwinism, he has become the scourge of the religious, the
atheist's answer to Billy Graham. At every opportunity, he preaches
the hard truth—there is no God, religion is superstition, and
Darwin proves just this. Essentially, what ties this volume together
is the crusade of nonbelief, for just about every piece carries this
same message.
The collection has seven sections. The first, Science and
Sensibility, ranges from an open letter to Tony Blair about
science, genetics and ethics to a savage attack on cultural studies
and postmodernism. The second, Light Will Be Thrown, takes
its title from Charles Darwin's comment in On the Origin of
Species about the pertinence of his theory to our species, and
the section is anchored by an introduction written for a new edition
of Darwin's Descent of Man. The third, The Infected
Mind, offers no prizes for discerning whose mind is infected
(too many are) and with what (religion). The fourth, They Told
Me, Heraclitus, contains eulogies for the science-fiction
writer Douglas Adams and the evolutionist William D. Hamilton.
Dawkins also puts the boot into purveyors of alternative medicines.
In the fifth, Even the Ranks of Tuscany, Dawkins spends a
lot of time quarreling with the late Stephen Jay Gould, who was
unwise enough to suggest that there is a place for both science and
religion. The sixth, There Is All Africa and Her Progenies in
Us, tells of Africa, the birthplace of Richard Dawkins.
Finally, in the seventh, A Prayer for my Daughter, the
author instructs his child not to believe in the Assumption of the
Virgin Mary.
I find myself of two minds about all of this. I welcome that the
world of nonbelief has such a vigorous champion. These days, in the
United States particularly, atheism does not have a very good press.
As the philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out recently, a politician
today could never be publicly rude about blacks or Jews or women or
the handicapped, but nonbelievers are fair game. The fact that
Thomas Jefferson, who used to scoff at the Trinity, could never
become president today is considered of no importance. Jesus is our
favorite philosopher, and that is that.
Also, I myself share just about every bit of Dawkins's nonbelief. I
too think that the Assumption of the Virgin is fiction. More than
this, I too feel that religion can be a force for positive evil. The
happenings in the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston prove that. One of
Dawkins's pieces tells of a televised discussion of cloning he took
part in, which included prominent religious leaders, one of whom
refused to shake hands with the women in the studio in case they
were menstruating. His behavior was disgusting.
However, I worry about the political consequences of Dawkins's
message. If Darwinism is a major contributor to nonbelief, then
should Darwinism be taught in publicly funded U.S. schools? The
Creationists say not. They argue that if the separation of Church
and State keeps belief out of the schools, then it should likewise
keep nonbelief out of the schools. There are issues to be grappled
with here, and Dawkins does nothing to address them. Does Darwinism
as such lead to nonbelief? It is true that Darwinism conflicts with
the Book of Genesis taken literally, but at least since the time of
Saint Augustine (400 A.D.)
Christians have been interpreting the seven days of creation
metaphorically.
I would like to see Dawkins take Christianity as seriously as he
undoubtedly expects Christianity to take Darwinism. I would also
like to see him spell out fully the arguments as to the
incompatibility of science (Darwinism especially) and religion
(Christianity especially). So long as his understanding of
Christianity remains at the sophomoric level, Dawkins does not
deserve full attention. It is all very well to sneer at Catholic
beliefs about the Virgin Mary, but what reply does Dawkins have to
the many theologians (like Jonathan Edwards) who have devoted huge
amounts of effort to distinguishing between false beliefs and true
ones? What reply does Dawkins have to the contemporary philosopher
Alvin Plantinga, who argues that the belief that there are other
minds and that others are not just unthinking robots requires a leap
of faith akin to the Christian belief in the Deity? Edwards and
Plantinga may be wrong, but Dawkins owes them some reply before he
gives his cocky negative conclusions. Moreover, once he has proved
the incompatibility of science and religion, I would like him to
address the classroom issue. Would he keep evolution out of U.S.
schools, and if not, what argument would he use? In one of these
pieces, he complains that British A-level examination requirements
necessitate coverage of so much other material that they exclude the
proper teaching of evolution. What about the U.S. Constitution?
Finally, I don't want to sound paranoid or insecure, but I do wish
that he and other science writers would cease assuming that
philosophical issues can be solved by talking in a brisk, confident
voice. I have no more liking of cultural studies than Dawkins, and I
loved his talk of "the low-grade intellectual poodling of
pseudo-philosophical poseurs." But this rhetoric is no
substitute for hard analysis. Postmodernists claim that science, no
less than religion and literature and philosophy, is infiltrated
with culture. How does Dawkins respond to this charge, given the
undoubted significance in science of metaphors that are based on the
culture of the day? One would have thought that the author of
The Selfish Gene would be sensitive to questions like
these.
There is more. I agree fully with Dawkins when he writes that
Modern physics teaches us that there is more to truth than
meets the eye; or than meets the all too limited human mind, evolved
as it was to cope with medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds
through medium distances in Africa.
But how then does Dawkins respond to the obvious retort of the
religious, who have always stressed mystery? Some of the fundamental
problems of philosophy are no closer to being solved today than they
were at the time of the Greeks: Why is there something rather than
nothing? Why is this something not something else? What is mind, and
are we unique? Perhaps one agrees that traditional
religions—Christianity specifically—do not offer the
full answers. But what is to stop a nonbeliever like myself from
saying that the Christians are asking important questions and that
they are right to have a little humility before the unknown? As
Saint Paul said: "Now we see through a glass, darkly."
That apparently includes Richard Dawkins.
I love Dawkins's books. They always make me mad and make me want to
respond. What more could an author ask?