Richard Dawkins wants to raise our consciousness — to “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one” (p. 1). And his new book, The God Delusion, certainly does have some high aspirations in this regard. As high, that is, as approximately one hundred and eighty pounds of protoplasm can have. Get a double-layered Hefty garbage bag and fill it with some kind of vegetable soup, shake it for a bit, and you have some idea of just how lofty an aspiration can actually be.
But the point is apparently not how high the aspiration has to be, but what you can get other bits of protoplasm to say about it in the blurbs, which is almost as good. But they need to say it in an energetic enough way to sway the general mass of protoplasmic bi-pedal carbon units out there, which is to say, the reading public. Because if enough bits of protoplasm get together on this, we can get ourselves a consensus going, and first thing you know you are dealing with the voice of Reason. The voice of Reason is what happens when any kind of physical wave (sound waves are best) shudders through a portion of the vegetable soup, dispelling the voice of Superstition forever.
Still, the blurbs are kinda fun. The noted intellectuals Penn and Teller say this:
“The God Delusion is smart, compassionate, and true like ice, like fire. If this book doesn’t change the world, we’re all screwed.”
Ahhhhuuhh. True like ice. True like fire. But how true are
those? How true are they together? Does the fire melt the ice, or does the melted ice put out the fire? Or both perhaps? True like a puddle with charcoal in it? Now we’re talking.
And then there was this from Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials triology. He said this, while obviously holding back:
“Many religious leaders today are men who, it’s obvious to anyone but their deranged followers, are willing to sanction vicious cruelty in the service of their faith. Dawkins hits them with all the power that reason can wield . . .”
Let me go on record right
now as saying that vicious cruelty is bad, and maybe it is here that we atheists and Christians can actually find some common ground and actually move the discussion forward, but, come to think of it, probably not.
Now of course, this is kind of early in my response to be pointing this out, but the thing has to be done some time. If that is the case, then why not make the point every other page or so? Or at least until someone gets it enough to attempt an answer. Reason, being a quaint and superstitious name we give to random neuron firings in the brain, wields no power at all. On atheist principles, expecting to find a correlation called “truth” between the chemical activities of the cerebral cortex in some people and the outside world is more than a little bit like astrology — or tying the bulls and bears of the stock market to the batting averages of professional baseball players. Can be done, I suppose, but why would we ever think that this random dance of atoms had anything whatever to do with that random dance of atoms?
“Fearless atheist leader, look! There goes a religious leader, with his deranged minions behind him! They are going out to perpetrate another vicious cruelty, and will perhaps even differ with us! Whatever shall we do?”
“Don’t waver, Bertrand. We shall wield the force of Reason. All together now — let’s fritz our brains at them!”
We are only in the preface to the book, but Dawkins begins with the idea that we religious types need to lay off the kids. He wants us to get jumpy about expressing ourselves too freely about that “nurture and admonition of the Lord” stuff.
“That is not a Muslim child, but a child of Muslim parents. That child is too young to know whether it is a Muslim or not. There is no such thing as a Muslim child. There is no such thing as a Christian child” (p. 3).
And of course, arid cognition is king around here. That child is also too young to know if it is a boy or a girl, and so it therefore follows that it must be neither. That child is too young to know if it is Canadian or Swiss, and so therefore it must belong to a holding tank at the United Nations. Apparently Dawkins instinctively felt that he was losing me with his deep argumentation right around this point, so he presses on to explain how it was that I got so silly.
“If this book works as I intend, religious readers will be atheists when they put it down. What presumptuous optimism! Of course, dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination using methods that took centuries to mature (whether by evolution or design). Among the more effective immunological devices is a dire warning to avoid even opening a book like this, which is surely a work of Satan” (pp. 5-6).
I don’t know. I would more inclined to consider it a jesuitical work of the Holy Spirit, designed to make lapsed Christians, who had unreflectingly drifted into a secular mindset, go running back to the Church in a panic.
That’s us! Immune to argument! They bounce right off my forehead, but even so, we Christians have to pretend to argue sometimes, to keep up appearances. Let’s see how it goes.
