Let me be even more specific: I am positive, from reading The God Delusion, that Dawkins has never read a single book by a single contemporary philosopher of religion, except that he read a book by Alister McGrath (which was about Dawkins himself).
I think you are underestimating Dawkins. There’s a strong element of the “
Courtier’s Reply” on this forum, a kind of reflex that says that those that don’t agree must simply be ignorant, or maybe just evil – denying what they really know to be true for nothing more than spite. All that kind of response does is dull your own senses, though, and makes critical thinking, especially about your own ideas, all the more difficult (The Aquinas threads here are really good examples of this…
oh you just haven’t studied Aquinas, doncha know? If you really had read Aquinas, you’d be nodding…).
Dawkins’ idea is one that attacks the foundation of all theology and religious philosophy: religious faith is meme that survives and thrives because (and only insofar as) it suppresses reason. By the garbage-in-garbage-out principle, it doesn’t matter how intricate or ornate your developments are, basing them on mystical, capricious assertions (Aquinas: *The maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus. – bzzzt!)*isn’t going to help you build real knowledge.
In a profound way, then, the Courtier’s Reply is to be expected, and carries very little weight on its own. For example, I’m carrying on a discussion elsewhere with someone who is trying to convince me that “I just don’t understand homeopathic medicine”, and that if I really would take time to try and
understand it (nevermind my constant requests to be corrected wherever I’m mistaken or misinformed that go unanswered), homeopathic medicine would really make good sense, and I would see the “truth” of that kind of treatment. At some point, Aquinas and Plantinga and Polkinghorne and van Til and Augustine and Ibn Rushd are pushing ideas that have no more
foundation than my homeopathy-loving friend’s ideas do. The arguments that are laid on top of it may be exquisite, baroque. But the foundations just do not hold in the light of serious, skeptical reasoning.
So, the complaint that Dawkins just doesn’t
really know Aquinas (or whoever) rings a bit hollow in that light. I said upthread (in Dawkins voice, to philosophy): whatcha got, really? And the answer, from Aquinas, or all those other guys, is “not much”, or “you just wait until your dead,
then you’ll understand”. Wherever the foundations are mystical, they are suspect, problematic. Time and again I’ve been urged to go read even
more Aquinas (and more van Til, and more Anselm, etc…), and it’s not something I regret, but only because I can say I’ve not held back from looking into it in a robust way. But for all those urgings to go read Thomist metapshysics, more, and more, and to really understand it, the more patently vacuous it becomes.
Is his argument “powerful”? Of course it is, and persuasive. After all, he is in the exact same position as the vast majority of people who read his book (especially young people). They also know virtually nothing about genuine religious thought; they are prepared to swallow everything he writes. Plus, let’s face it: He appeals to the rebel, the iconoclast, in all of us. Again, young people are especially susceptible to this.
There’s an irony here. For all your disparaging of Dawkins, this paragraph suggests you’ve not made much of an effort to hear what he’s saying at all. It’s nothing so easily brushed aside as “he’s just appealing to the rebel”. His charge is that The Emperor Has No Clothes, that the very foundation of religious thought is irrational, self-indulgent, illicit as a matter of serious truth seeking. Religion has had such cultural hegemony for so long that the Courtier’s aghast reactions to such talk made straight talk about the Emperor’s imaginary clothes very difficult.
He’s not a philosopher. He’s a cheerleader for atheism.
Science is philosophy – “science” is a recent term, it used to be referred to as “natural philosophy”. If anything, Dawkins’ fault is simply that he’s beating a dead horse, “selling past the close”. Religious philosophy won’t ever die, but it’s been beaten
as philosophy (I
know, just wait until I die…), and the hard truth, detectable even here, is that religous folk, Catholics included, aren’t nearly as convinced of the merits of theology or religous philosophy as apologists would like to have us think; rather, they are committed to the idea that even if religious philosophy is shaky, or even bogus, religion is a cultural imperative nonetheless.
The disparity between the practical performance of science and the caprice of theology is now so apparent, so stark, that Dawkins I think needn’t bother with the polemic he advances. It’s an interesting idea as science, Catholicism and all the other religions as “memes” that survive via the traits and propagation schemes he sketches out in *The God Delusion. *But religious philosophy hardly needs to be discredited anymore as a secular good. The real “pholosophical battle” is happening on a different field, the battle over whether religion is best to keep around even if it
is just a meme, so much made-up, imaginary stuff. As an atheist now for several years, I’m continually shocked by the number of times theists will reach the end of a discussion and draw their ultimate line in the sand: Christianity is better than atheism (or Islam, or Buddhism, or…), even if it’s false.
That’s an interesting question (see D’Souza’s book, for example), and one that Dawkins would be wiser to focus on then beating the dead horse of theology.
-TS
